Visiting Artists 2011–12
Abbott Miller
Abbott’s projects address the cultural role of design and the public life of the written word. At Pentagram he leads a team designing books, magazines, catalogs, identities, exhibitions, and creating editorial projects. His work and critical writing has appeared in Eye, Print, I.D. and other publications, and he is the co-author of four books, including the classic Design/Writing/Research: Writing on Graphic Design.
Alicia Cheng
Alicia Cheng is founding partner of MGMT Design. She has worked as senior designer for Method, New York and was the co-director of design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. She has taught and served as a frequent visiting critic at Yale University, RISD, MICA, and the Cooper Union School of Art. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Yale University.
JK Keller
Jonathan Keller Keller is an artist currently living and working in Baltimore, MD. He received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Interactive Multimedia from the Minneapolis College of Art + Design in 1999 and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2007. Working at the intersection of craft, collection, and computation, Keller seeks to transcend & transform everyday digital elements through obsessive, iterative, and generative processes.
Mike Perry
This graduate of Minneapolis College of Art and Design is a doer, maker, designer, illustrator, and author. His book Hand Job celebrates the life of hand-lettering in contemporary design. He worked on staff for Urban Outfitters and now runs his own studio in Brooklyn, NY. His work is featured in the exhibition Graphic Design: Now In Production.
Rick Valicenti
Rick Valicenti has been a leading presence in design as a practitioner, an educator, and a mentor. In 1988, he founded Thirst, a Chicago-based design collaborative devoted to art, function, and real human presence. In 2006, Valicenti was honored with the AIGA Medal and was included in Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Triennial. He is the editor of a monograph on Thirst, Emotion as Promotion.
Rob Giampietro
Rob Giampietro is a principal at Project Projects, a design studio in New York. He studied graphic design and literature at Yale University and worked as a designer at Winterhouse, The New York Times Magazine, and Pentagram. From 2003 to 2008, he was cofounder and principal of the award-winning design studio Giampietro+Smith. Rob’s essays and commentary have appeared in Dot Dot Dot, Design Observer, BusinessWeek, and on NPR.
Stephen Farrell
Award-winning designer Stephen Farrell creates work that is intricately detailed, avowedly non-commercial,and unabashedly intellectual. Farrell designs experimental fonts and fiction, and he teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Projects include the novel VAS, a full-on collaboration with author Steve Tomasula. Farrell’s digital typeface Volgare is based on a 1601 Florentine manuscript written by an anonymous clerk. Volgare includes over 500 distinct glyphs, including ligatures, word endings, and combination characters.
Teddy Cruz
Teddy Cruz, co-founder of CUE/Center for Urban Ecologies and Professor of Culture and Urbanism, University of California San Diego, is an architect with a humane vision for metropolitan areas across America whose work breaks down physical and cultural barriers, mixing wealthy and poor, old and new, and public and private. Internationally renowned for his urban research on the Tijuana-San Diego border, his work focuses on traditionally overlooked poor, minority and immigrant communities and spaces, and has transformed border neighborhoods in California and communities in New York by creating affordable, quality housing and public infrastructure.