Designing Resistance with Nikki Juen, Rick Valicenti, and Ziddi Msangi

The history of protest is grounded in the continuing saga of struggle. Fiery calls for resistance have been heard, heeded, and amplified thousands of times over. And versions of this message — built upon by activists working on behalf of civil rights, the antiwar movement, gender equality, LGBTQIA+ rights, environmentalism, and more — have found their way onto the print materials used to rebut the status quo. This panel will assemble Strikethrough artists from around the globe whose visual innovation merges with their social justice mission.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4eh5xxua

Relational Design in DiiD Issue 76 →

Nikki Juen and Basma Hamdy are two graphic design professors from North America and the Middle East respectively. Despite the distance between them, they are both operating in the spaces between the individual and institution, subject and system, and their practice, in different ways, is concerned with public mass demonstrations but also individual efforts and grass roots protest. They discuss how their approach to design teaching and practice is more concerned with energies over objects, with processes over products, and with legacies over artifacts and how their work moves beyond the four walls of the institution and outside the traditional definitions of design practice into fluid, participatory spaces.

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“Here the discussion is about how form, function, value and meaning retreat from market logic yet transform the behaviour and structure of society or individuals in a global and contemporary manner through the cultures of design and its practices. 

Paolo Cardini has orchestrated this observation by highlighting a community of researchers who are studying and applying these themes at the intercontinental level, and with the awe-struck curiosity of children we remain drawn to and pensive before the array of images that illustrate this issue.”

– Flaviani Celaschi

Design + Diversity Conference

The Design + Diversity conference explores proactive ways to make the design industry more diverse. This is the only conference that focuses on diversity issues in the design field. This event provides a platform for constructive conversation among those who design, innovate, and lead. We welcome the perspective of diversity and inclusion professionals, designers, and any active enthusiast.

Design this Better RISD

This speech was delivered by Nikki Juen at the Rhode Island School of Design Commencement Honorees Dinner upon Juen's receipt of the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching.

#risdmuseum #risdlove #risd #wisdomlookson #risd #designeducation #designthisbetter #gatekeepers #designpedagogy #designthisbetterrisd #radicalchange #catalyst #adjunct #adjunctadvocacy #parttimefaculty #thelovelab

Source: https://vimeo.com/342119189

ACADEMIC TERM APPOINTMENT AT RISD

I’m pleased to announce that I have recently joined the full-time faculty at Rhode Island School of Design as an Assistant Professor for the 18/19 academic year. My term appointment will take place in the RISD Division of Experimental and Foundations Studies, where I have been teaching for the past decade.

I will also continue my role at Vermont College of Fine Arts as Faculty Co-Chair and Mentor in the Master of Fine Arts Graphic Design Program.

I’m thrilled about this opportunity and could not have hoped for better mentors along the way.

Video Installation by RISD student Elizabeth Mullaney GD '21

Video Installation by RISD student Elizabeth Mullaney GD '21

HERE VOL. 2, WINTER 2017

25th Anniversary issue of HERE Volume 2 a publication of the Vermont College of Fine Arts Visual Art Program. Edited by Danielle Dahline, Dont Rhine, and Fatih Wilding.

Cover of HERE 2 designed by Silas Munro

Cover of HERE 2 designed by Silas Munro

Inside spread of HERE 2, collaboration with #othertallblond collective member, Veronica Cross

Inside spread of HERE 2, collaboration with #othertallblond collective member, Veronica Cross

NOT HERE / NOT THERE

I’d like to make Rene Descartes do cartwheels across a pastoral ocean-side lawn at sunset. I’d like to watch his body tumble over his mind forever unseating the objective, scientific and brain-down thought that has dominated the production of knowledge for far too long.
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Descartes-wheel decreed the body an unreliable receptor and favored mind over body forever separating the two. This constructed boundary between mind and body has defined knowledge as separate from the knower in various forms, and by various philosophers, for hundreds of years. From this perspective, the valuation of the objective materialism of knowledge is pitted against the intuitive knowing of individual subjects. The gut senses are at odds with empirical proofs.
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THERE is the objective, the dominant hegemony of the academies, the privileged appraisal of the value of knowledge, the constructed scientific materialisms. HERE is the space of the individual, the personal memories and the ancient wisdoms. The subjective space of HERE is held in critical disregard in the academy and is in need of reorientation.
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I recognize the movement between HERE and THERE as the space of productive frictions that elide. A charnel ground of potential between what is known and what is yet to be discovered. Views, beliefs, and dreams of an/other is a movement towards discovering what lies beyond what has been embedded in y/our bodies by histories, ideologies and biologies that may not support well being in the academy.
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An educator dealing in absolutes is in a dangerous position. A position which assumes that bodies of knowledge are held in singular locations or solitary actions. In a studio classroom, knowledge rarely flows unidirectionally and learning becomes a social exchange. Can our practice as academic artists remove the binaric boundary between empirical and intuitive, qualitative and quantitative, here and there in favor of experiencing the sharing of knowledge through the boundary, with the boundary?
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Could we consider the boundary an immaterial location? [Trinh T. Minh-ha]
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Divergent objects and spaces can also be movements toward body oriented pedagogies [Oren Ergas] and the reclaiming of subjective experiences in the location, reclamation and production of knowledges.
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The academy is exactly the place for the collisions of views and ideas. This collisional event is a clash or conflict and can also be an encounter between particles resulting in exchange or transformation of energy.
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Being a teacher is being with people. [bell hooks]
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My body will stay healthy in the academies it inhabits. I will say ‘no’ to locations that pull unilaterally here or there and instead inhabit the places my body longs for and is remembered in. The glades of sense, memories and archaic time.

–Nikki Juen
copyright © 2016
 

 

VCFA Lecture Resources: ME/WE/US/SHE™

SELECTIONS + VIDEOS:
Kimberle Crenshaw, 'Intersectional Feminism'
Carol Hanisch, ‘The Personal is Political’
https://bitchmedia.org/article/audre-lorde-thought-self-care-act-political-warfare
Betty Saar: The Liberation of Aunt Jemima
Racial bias in film, video, commercialisms

BOOKS:
The Female Complaint by Lauren Berlant
Women And Nature by Susan Griffin
Why I Am Not A Feminist by Jessa Crispin
The Witch Has A System by Trini Dalton
Advice From My 80-Year-Old Self by Susan O'Malley
We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
Feminism Is For Everybody by bell hooks
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
We Were Feminists Once by Andi Zeisler

ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS:
Jenna Blazevich
Elizabeth Duffy
Faith Wilding
Cauleen Smith
Patty Chang
Juen MFA thesis

NY MAG, 11 Female Art Professors and Teachers on Their Favorite Female Artists

“Designer, printmaker, artist, and educator Corita Kent has been a longtime inspiration and guide. Every time I drive by that natural gas tank just outside of the city of Boston, I feel a kinship and comfort in her exuberant stripes and colors. I have long enjoyed all the urban myths regarding various images that can be extracted from the paint strokes. I imagine Kent would have liked that, people looking deeply and intuiting messages beyond the surface. Her rules for students and educators are lighthearted but exactly on point and they serve as a foundation for my own teaching practices. Her work is bright, daring, and subversive.”
–Nikki Juen, instructor and lecturer of experimental and foundation studies, RISD

AIGA Chicago Women Lead

Good evening from Morningstar Chicago! 3.8.2017

Good evening from Morningstar Chicago! 3.8.2017

Hello AIGA Chicago!

It's been a week since I was with you in Chicago and I haven't stopped thinking about your kindness, receptivity and thoughtful questions. Thank you for coming to listen to what Tereasa, Susan and I had to offer. I only regret that we didn't have more time together, there is so much to share towards living and thriving as a woman in the design fields.

To that end, I am sharing some of the authors and books that have been my guides, and at times, my irritants. Either way they have somehow stimulated my thinking and helped me find ways to inhabit my experiences. I hope you find some of them interesting and useful.

I loved your city and I can't wait to return, I hope to see you again in the near future.

Thanks again — Susan, Anya, Tereasa, Heather, Silvana, Morgan, Marissa and Mig. Such a pleasure me meet you all. 

xo, Nikki

 

The Argonauts
By Maggie Nelson
We Should All Be Feminists
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Men Explain Things to Me
By Rebecca Solnit