Gradient Archives:
The Gradientis a blog run by current and former members of the Walker Art Center's design studio since 2005, focusing on the intersection of contemporary art and graphic design. This page includes highlights from the first 15 years: interviews, articles, experiments.
“An accessible world is one that shifts the burden off of disabled people,” says Aimi Hamraie, director of the Critical Design Lab, “and also asks what the user experience of all these new technologies is, and who are they potentially harming.” Here, curator Michelle Millar Fisher speaks with Hamraie and fashion model and activist Jillian Mercado about how designers can imagine accessible futures even as people with disabilities are “surviving apocalypses that are happening in the present.”
Sovereign Typesetting: An Interview with Typefaces of the Temporary State
In this interview we speak with Roman Gornitsky of the type foundry Typefaces of the Temporary State about the origins of his current foundry, the shifting definition of independence, his latest typeface release Gramatika, and how a myriad of sources—writing, workshops, and research all serve to inform his output.
“[…] small, local, open, connected. These four adjectives work well in defining this scenario because they generate a holistic vision of how society could be,” says renowned social innovation expert Ezio Manzini. “At the same time, they are also readily comprehensible, since everybody easily understands their meaning and implications by looking at the prototypes and the transformative normality on which they are based.”
The More Equitable Future Begins in the Imagination
There is a “dilemma uniting artists and many of today’s workers,” writes Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future: “flexibility and freedom on the one hand, precariousness and instability on the other. … Herein lies an opportunity for a new kind of solidarity.” In this article, Gorbis lays out a case for the necessity of art when imagining new, equitable futures, and introduces the Institute’s expanded concept of Universal Basic Assets.
Can design be a realm of pure magic? How do designers manipulate symbols imbued with historical texture and richness? How does a trans spirit not only survive but thrive in abundance? Rin Kim—a New York–based trans multidisciplinary chimera, demi, hydra, mutt, graphic designer, filmmaker, alchemist, performance artist, writer, and yong (룡)—discusses these and other questions in a new interview. When asked banal questions about their design process and career Rin returns with mystical pleasures, spells of vengeance, and prayers of golden victory.
“The challenge for design,” according to curator and museum director Zoë Ryan, “is to recognize market forces and political constraints while maintaining enough distance to foster the imagination and allow critical positions that can reorganize and rethink economies, ecologies, information systems, and social groups using the languages, forms, and methods of design.” Here, Ryan pursues this idea through the vital work of designers Dunne & Raby, Mary Maggic, and Forensic Architecture.
Sharing as Survival: Mindy Seu on the Cyberfeminism Index
How can remnants of digital pasts inform our paths towards diverse futures? How do our digital tools reflect our ethical orientation towards our technologies? In this wide-ranging interview, Mindy Seu discusses the Cyberfeminism Index and its strategies of radical gathering and sharing; what it means to create an "anti-canon"; and design and social justice.
What do our collective images of the future tell us about our priorities in the present? How do we design visions of the future intended to defuse other, more perilous futures? Published on the occasion of the exhibition Designs for Different Futures, this essay by designer, curator, and museum director Andrew Blauvelt examines the momentous game of catch-up that humanity must play in order to survive its own conceptions of the future.
Like many designers, Justin Hunt Sloane’s practice frequently extends outside himself—placing him in proximity with a slowly cultivated network of like-minded friends, partners, and artists. In this multi-part interview, we explore three of his ongoing projects via conversations with his collaborators at Total Luxury Spa, Garagisme, and Ghostly International.
Building a Vague Hypebeast: Fragmented Fashion by Joshua McGarvey
Joshua McGarvey is a Minnesota-based clothing designer, fashion artist, and installation/video artist who creates garments under the name Uselding Fridays. The results are often loud, colorful pieces—uncanny mashups of styles, brands and silhouettes which frequently collage together elements of second hand or deadstock garments. These chaotic amalgams offer concise, wearable critiques of the love/hate relationship we have with our hyper-capitalistic environment, often reducing brand symbolism down to abstract texture (a technique he refers to as “ambient distraction”).
Pluralism and Power Dynamics in Indian Design: November Studio
"The impetus for this interview was kind of selfish," writes Walker designer Somnath Bhatt. "As a designer of south Asian background, I wish I'd read something like this when I was a student." Here he speaks with Shiva Nallaperumal and Juhi Vishnani, founders of the India-based design studio November, about their work developing a framework for a plural design practice, gathering a regionalized Indian graphic archive, exploring nuances of world typography, and questioning what it means to design in an era of rising fascism.
To date, artist and educator Maia Ruth Lee has made some 250 sculptural glyphs from the scrapped steel decorative elements that adorn fences and window bars around New York City. Here, she talks about the process of making a new lexicon of symbols and the connection between feeling, intuition, and language.
"Design education not only teaches its technical and historical canon, or how to design, but more importantly teaches students how to be designers in society and in relation to capital," writes designer Jacob Lindgren. "A school becomes a factory producing designers, one that, in keeping with the principles of 'good design,' turns them into efficient and interchangeable parts ready to hit the market." In a new essay, Lindgren proposes models that may help us undo this factory setting of graphic design.
Designing for Elizabeth Price: An Interview with Matthew Fenton
With this directive, Elizabeth Price engaged the British studio Spencer Fenton to create two custom typefaces for her SLOW DANS trilogy: "I want it to be modular, created using variations and arrangements of a single unit, shaped like a stitch or a seed, with hints of jacquard looms, pianola scrolls, and Tetris games." Here Matthew Fenton discusses collaborating with Price to create works on view in her Walker solo show.
"I believe that fashion makes people happy; it allows people to let others know about themselves by the way they look and dress. Hairstyles, makeup, fragrance, tattoos: it’s more than just clothing," says designer Delina White of IAmAnishinaabe. This lookbook—showcasing fashions and models featured in our June Indigenous Spirit: Gender Fluid Fashion show—celebrates designs that honor Native tradition, diversity, and nonconformity as imagined through the Anishinaabe term Niizho-Manidoog: the sacred embodiment of two genders.
On the Inside: Eline Mul on Designing an Exhibition for Incarcerated LGBTQ+ Artists
How can an exhibition represent and give voice to a forgotten group of people? On The Inside, curated by Tatiana von Fürstenberg and designed by Eline Mul, puts on display the work of hundreds of LGBTQ+ artists currently serving time in the prison system. The submitted artwork, coupled with quotes from the artists, creates a powerful and humanizing message about injustice, but also about identity, love, and acceptance. Here, designer Ben Schwartz discusses the project with Mul.
Toying with the Future: AI, Fantasy, and Zach Blas's Icosahedron
"I used a children’s toy to respond to the childish masculinity and bravado of someone like Peter Thiel, but also to play with these words of 'toying' and 'gaming.' They’re toying with the world’s future." Zach Blas discusses Icosahedron, a Walker-commissioned installation that references elves in The Lord of the Rings, AI, and the Magic 8-Ball toy to critique predictive technologies prevalent today.
What does car culture look like beyond the car? With a background in art direction, photography, and a complex relationship to cars, Gilles Uzan started Garagisme in 2012, as a self-described "Contemporary Automotive Journal." The magazine focuses on our relationship to these polarizing objects, utilizing them as a means of accessing the past and present in addition to becoming a platform for speculation. Now on its sixth issue Garagisme approaches the complexities of capitalism through the lens of its nearly 30 contributors and their associated marks, artifacts, futures, and stories.
Touching a Third Sound: Trans-Sensing in a World of Deepfakes
In this world of cheap visual proliferation, we're forced to make quick binary judgments—i.e. real/fake, good/bad, man/woman—which often leave us feeling disempowered and reduced to slotting. In the 13th installment of the Artist Op-Eds series, composer and visual artist Jules Gimbrone proposes what they term Trans-Sensing as a model for a more nuanced way of experiencing the world, one that transcends the quantitative binary of real/fake and doesn't rely on the categorical flattening of complexity that comes with merely seeing.
Interventionist Typography: Erik Brandt on Five Years of Ficciones Typografika
Between 2013 and 2018, a humble alleyway in Minneapolis's Powderhorn Park neighborhood was transformed into an unlikely showcase of global design innovation. On a 72 x 36-inch garage-side panel dubbed Ficciones Typografika, Erik Brandt presented typographic experiments by the likes of Eike König, Sarah Boris, Bráulio Amado, and Walker designers Jasio Stefanski and Ben Schwartz—1,641 in total. In a Walker Reader exclusive, we share a conversation with Brandt from Ficciones Typografika: 1642, a new Formist Editions monograph chronicling the project.
Behind the Eyes, Inside the Skull: Karl Nawrot Discusses Mind Walks
Mind Walks is a book documenting the work of graphic designer/illustrator Karl Nawrot from 2004 to 2017. The dense publication showcases nearly 900 images of design, architecture, illustration, stamps, and stencils from Nawrot, who has in the past been much more reserved about revealing the depth of his practice. In a new interview, designer Ben Schwartz speaks with Nawrot about Mind Walks, the process of sorting through one's own archives, and the futility of closing your own chapters.
Slavs and Tatars: Siah Armajani, Red-Black Thread, and the Art and Act of Reading
"Reading is a civic act. As much as we are suckers for the oral, the written word manages to constitute a social body in ways too often lacking today: a rigor in terms of focus, a polyphony of voices." In conversation with designer Aryn Beitz, the Berlin-based art collective Slavs and Tatars discusses its contributions to the Siah Armajani: Follow This Line exhibition and catalogue, both of which strive to attain what it claims Armajani has mastered: the ability to engage and create a public by suggesting reading, without actually requiring it.
Bobby Rogers: A Re-Energizing of the Black Arts Movement
In 1966, Amiri Baraka wrote that Black poems, and Black art as well, should “shoot, come at you, love what you are.” It's in this same vein of urgency and cultural importance that the work of Minneapolis-based photographer Bobby Rogers strikes you—as lightning at first, strong and electric, then as a subtle love nestled into the details. Here, Devyn Springer follows the thread between Rogers's personal artistic practice and his recent commission photographing the jazz innovators of the Walker's Sonic Universe Project.
