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, 2025

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.

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Published in STIRworld  | April 2, 2025

‘Reverberations’ reframes narratives of BIPOC design history from a pluriversal lens

By Asmita Singh

Design, like culture, can never stand to be neutral—it often upholds existing power structures or dares to disrupt them. Reverberations: Lineages in Design History, the group exhibition at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York, makes this tension its central premise. The exhibition offers an educational space reimagining narratives of design traditions, with Indigenous, Black and POC voices as central to its history. From provocative displays of visual and spatial installations to interactive augmented reality experiences imagining a more equitable future, Reverberations is on view at the gallery from March 4 – May 3, 2025.

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Published in Hyperallergic  | April 20, 2025

A Vision of Design That Transcends Empire’s Grid

By Petala Ironcloud

Western design has long obeyed the dicta of fin de siècle and early 20th-century Berlin and Paris — that ornament is crime, that form follows function, that clarity trumps complexity. Non-European traditions, however, weren’t peripheral influences to design, but rather systems with their own complex codes. Slipping past the now-famous glass-enclosed forest at the Ford Foundation, I felt the water rippling toward something percussive, living, and deeply modern in Reverberations: Lineages in Design History. The exhibition traces design’s pulse across Indigenous, Black, and other historically marginalized cultures — not as isolated oases, but as multiple continuous and resounding centers.