2021

My essay A Counting / Accounting: Piotr Szyhalski’s Visual Journal of the Plague Year was published in the book COVID-19: Labor Camp Report, published in July 2021 by the independent publishing house Frank. Szyhalski’s epic project—225 ink drawings, made one-a-day from March through November 2020—critiques the politics of the pandemic and the uprising for racial justice following George Floyd’s murder. The monograph of this project was funded (via Kickstarter) by the Report’s social media followers, and includes several specially commissioned essays, along with the artist’s sketches for each daily drawing, and full-page images of the 225 drawings.

As Visiting Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture + Planning (SA+P) during the 2020-21 academic year, I taught a new graduate seminar on “Design, Play and Learning” in the Spring semester (via Zoom, of course); edited the Dean’s Newsletters; and served as Director of SA+P’s inaugural Architecture + Design Summer Academy for High School juniors and seniors, which drew nearly 30 teens to its sessions, held in Albuquerque (at SA+P) and Santa Fe (at the New Mexico School for the Arts), from June 21-July 23, 2021.

2020:

My book Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bauhaus: Portraits in Architecture and Design—Selected Writings of Janet Abrams was published in October 2020 by Princeton Architectural Press. This book includes twenty-six of my major profiles of leading US and European architects and designers that first appeared in magazines, newspapers, books, monographs and exhibitions catalogues from the early 1980s to the mid 2000s. Foreword by Deyan Sudjic, Director Emeritus of the Design Museum, London.

I designed, built and edited the website for Quartz Inversion: Pandemic Ceramics, an online exhibit of “lockdown” work by 64 international ceramic artists from 17 countries. On individual portfolio pages, they describe, in first-person narratives, how they adapted their studio practices during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. I co-curated QI Round One with Adil Writer, a ceramist based in Auroville, India. We asked each QI R1 artist to nominate another ceramist for QI Round 2, which I built in the fall and launched in December 2020.

WWW Drawing: Architectural Drawing from Pencil to Pixel, which I edited, was published in 2020 by ACTAR, Barcelona. This book builds on papers presented at a symposium held at the Drawing Center, New York—the final component of the WWW Drawing Project that I produced while working as Special Projects Director at Penn State University’s Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. The book, beautifully designed by Marga Gibert of ACTAR, can be previewed here.

2019:

Building the Legacy of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, my interview with Lisa LeFeuvre, newly appointed Executive DIrector of the Holt / Smithson Foundation, appeared in Southwest Contemporary magazine August 2019. Former Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Foundation, UK, and a juror for the Turner Prize 2018, Le Feuvre outlines her goals for the Foundation, scheduled to exist for just 20 years, through 2038.

Cultural Crossings published in CRAFTS (the UK Crafts Council’s magazine) July-August 2019 issue, reveals the outsized influence of India’s Golden Bridge Pottery in Pondicherry, on contemporary Indian ceramics. Founded in the 1970s by the American ceramists Deborah Smith and Ray Meeker, GBP’s Seven Month Course apprenticeship program has trained numerous distinguished Indian ceramists, including Rakhee Kane, Adil Writer, Supriya Menon Meneghetti and Ange Peter whom I interviewed in Pondicherry and nearby Auroville, in March 2019.

My review of the Whitney Biennial 2019 appeared in the July 2019 issue of Southwestern Contemporary, accompanied by my own photos—my debut as a contributor to this publication, which covers the arts in the Southwestern US as well as (occasionally) further afield. 

I gave the Closing Remarks at After the Bauhaus, Before the Internet: A History of Graphic Design Pedagogy, Yale University’s two-day conference on graphic design education in the 20th Century, in May 2019, organized by Geoff Kaplan and hosted by the Department of Art History, with over a dozen presentations by graphic design luminaries including Audrey Bennett, Andrew Blauvelt, Sheila de Bretteville, Hugh Dubberly, Deborah Littlejohn, Katherine McCoy and Lorraine Wild, as well as distinguished thinkers from several adjacent fields.