Reverberations: Lineages in Design History features over fifty artists and designers with artworks reflecting rich cultural ancestries through pattern, type, technique, form and beyond. On view March 4 through May 3, the exhibition transforms the gallery into an expansive educational space, reimagining design history to feature Indigenous, Black and People of Color designers and cultural figures.

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Published in IMPULSE Magazine  | March 13, 2035

Visual Lineages

By Sterling Corum

Text and dialogue play a key role in understanding culture through linear, traditional learning structure, but Reverberations: Lineages in Design History explore beyond the expected. It is a modicum of learning materials mixed with interactive elements, proving that visual design patterns can be viable tools for understanding how design fits into our lives across generations. Its classroom of works reimagines the medium of protest and dissent, from typical motifs of picket signs to the hints of oppression used in traditional woven Māori panels to the digital reliquary of BIPOC design history, a series of online lectures by Polymode that inspired the exhibition. While this may sound academically rigorous, what you’ll find inside the gallery’s quaint walls is actually a collection that spans lifetimes and speaks for itself, which it now has to. There are no attributions or captions posted next to any of the art pieces—a move that subverts the traditional gallery structure and forces viewers to make connections and absorb each work’s visual impact independently, putting poetry, textile, graphic design, and 3D-printed ceramic all on the same playing field.