MARCH – 3 MAY 2025 Reverberations: Lineages in Design History 4 - Ford Foundation Gallery
Curated by Brian Johnson and Silas Munro
Reverberations: Lineages in Design History transforms the gallery into an expansive educational space, reimagining design history to feature Indigenous, Black, and People of Color designers and cultural figures. With a dazzling assemblage of historical and contemporary works of art and design by over fifty artists, Reverberations questions the narrative of design tradition as a single dominant line. Reflecting on rich ancestries that reverberate across epochs, alphabets and graphic languages transmit contours of wisdom across cultures. Multidimensional maps reveal layers of experience and counter colonial flattening and erasures. Visual strategies deployed by Black designers are reinforced as motifs in present-day avant-garde data visualizations. And intricate Indigenous traditions of beadwork and textile art weave ancestral knowledge into the future.
Reverberations is curated by Brian Johnson and Silas Munro with the advice of curatorial advisors Randa Hadi, Lisa Maione, and Ramon Tejada. The exhibition is inspired by BIPOC Design History, a series of courses facilitated by the design studio Polymode. Beginning online in 2021, these collaborative courses created a one-room schoolhouse informed by generations of design practitioners, an experiment in expanding access to learning while inspiring future generations.
