Reverberations in Dialogue: Collaboration and Community in Design

Please join us on Tuesday, April 29th, from 6-7:30pm for a conversation with Reverberations: Lineages in Design curators Brian Johnson and Silas Munro about the importance of collaboration and community in design. 

Reverberations is inspired by BIPOC Design History, a series of collectively authored and collaborative courses informed by multi-generations of design practitioners from around the world. In discussing the curatorial concepts of the exhibition and inspirations for the courses, mutual support and collective care come to the forefront of design ethos.

This event is presented as part of the gallery exhibition Reverberations: Lineages in Design History on view now through May 3.

About the Speakers

Brian Johnson, a member of the Monacan Indian Nation, is an award-winning designer and curator. He is a partner of Polymode, where he focuses on amplifying marginalized and forgotten voices through poetic research, learning experiences, and impactful design. He has guest lectured and hosted workshops at the School of Visual Arts; the Walker Art Center; AIGA’s National Design Conference; his alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design; and is one of the founders of the online learning platform BIPOC Design History. As a curator, he is the author of Posters That Sing: Indigenous / Native American Printed and Designed Works, an exhibition scheduled to open September of 2026, at Poster House museum in New York. Johnson is the recipient of the 2023-24 Emily Hall Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators for which he is focusing on Indigenous-made works to combat erasure and decolonize design. The three-part article series, “Designing a History of Indigenous Graphic Artists”, “How Can a Poster Sing?”, and “Can We Find Our Way to Indigenous Joy?”, appear on Hyperallergic. He is a contributor to the upcoming publication, Gatherings: New Directions in Indigenous Book History published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Silas Munro is a designer, artist, writer, researcher, curator, surfer and descendant of the Banyole people of Eastern Uganda. He is the founder of the design studio Polymode based in Los Angeles and Raleigh that works with clients across cultural spheres. Munro is the curator and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest at Letterform Archive in 2022-2023. He was a contributor to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America and co-authored the first BIPOC-centered design history course, Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design 19th-21st Century. His work was recently exhibited at the Raizes Gallery at Lesley University, the LA Design Festival, and the Scottsdale Museum of Art, and is included in the collections of Tufts University, Lesley University, and the Montalvo Arts Center. A solo exhibition, How Can the Grid Deal with a Messy World? Is currently on view at The University of Hartford’s Joseloff Gallery. Munro is Founding Faculty, Chair Emeritus for the MFA Program in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts.