The Ford Foundation Gallery will present Reverberations: Lineages in Design History, opening on March 4. The exhibition will transform the Ford Foundation gallery into an educational space that reframes design history to center on Indigenous, Black, and People of Color (IBPOC) designers and cultural figures. In amplifying these stories, Reverberations seeks to counters the narrative of design tradition as a single dominant line and to undo colonial erasures. The featured artworks reflect rich cultural ancestries that reverberate across time and intend to bring forward and celebrate voices that have gone unheard.
Reverberations, with over 50 artists and designers, is curated by Brian Johnson and Silas Munro with the advice of curatorial advisors Randa Hadi, Lisa Maione, and Ramon Tejada. Visitors are invited into a thematically organized experience tracing reverberations in design over the centuries, landscapes, and traditions they flow out of and into.
The works take many forms: multidimensional maps reveal layers of experience and counter colonial flattening and erasures; varied alphabets and graphic languages transmit contours of wisdom across cultures; intricate Indigenous traditions of beadwork and textile art weave ancestral knowledge into the future; posters intertwine text and image to bring people together and drive social action; and works such as avant-garde data visualizations, narrative painting amplified through poster design, and stamp design reveal facets of visual strategies deployed by Black designers past, present, and future. Points of connection among these diverse artworks are highlighted by their many artistic acts of storytelling, mapping, symbolizing, teaching, languaging, and futuring.
