The Walker Art Center and AIGA Minnesota are co-presenting the Insights Design Lecture Series. Featuring leading graphic designers and design thinkers from around the world, the series takes place March 12–April 20, 2024 at the Walker Art Center.
Exploring the theme of collaboration through a variety of perspectives and approaches, this year’s Insights pairs four in-person lectures with expanded programs that range from virtual workshops to articles, special projects, and more. The in-person lineup features innovators in type and motion DIA Studio, Brooklyn Public Library Creative Director Leila Taylor, long-term collaborators Studio Lin, as well as the Twin Cities Zine Fest, whose members have championed sustainable self-publishing and the DIY ethic for 20 years.
Expanded programming includes workshops f rom the Feminist Center for Creative Work in Los Angeles’s Co-Conspirator Press, and Chicago’s Half Letter Press/Temporary Services. On walkerart.org, David Gissen, author of The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access, invites designers, thinkers, and disability activists to reimagine everyday objects freed from concepts of a “normal body.”
• Alex Lin / Studio Lin. Tuesday, March 12, 7 pm. Since 2012, New York–based Studio Lin has focused on long-term collaborations across art, architecture, and photography with a focus on publications, identity, exhibition, and web design. Clients with multi-year projects at the studio have included the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Princeton School of Architecture, and art book publishers Aperture and Capricious.
• Leila Taylor / Brooklyn Public Library. Tuesday, March 19, 7 pm. As creative director of the Brooklyn Public Library since 2015, Leila Taylor collaborates across multiple publics in one of the nation’s largest library systems. Recent projects include Books Unbanned, a nationwide initiative combating book bans; The People’s Ball, the anti-Met Gala; and The Book of HOV, an exhibition on the life of Shawn “JAYZ” Carter created by Roc Nation in partnership with Brooklyn Public Library. She is also the author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, equal parts Afrogoth memoir and trenchant analysis of the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the cultural work of mourning.
• Mitch Paone / DIA Studio. Tuesday, March 26, 7 pm. Founded by Creative Director Mitch Paone and Managing Partner Meg Donohoe, DIA Studio has been instrumental in repositioning typography and motion at the center of brand design in recent years. As smartphones and screens of all kinds reorganize viewership and the ways brands engage with customers, DIA Studio has collaborated with Squarespace, Nike, Adidas, and YouTube to create bespoke, moving typographic compositions from app to architectural scale. Trained as a jazz pianist, Paone brings a musician’s knowledge of tempo, arrangement, and rhythm to the creation of design systems that have invited the field to rethink the possibilities of formerly static approaches.
Twin Cities Zine Fest Tuesday, April 2, 7 pm. For 20 years, the Twin Cities Zine Fest (TCZF) has welcomed creatives, rebels, musicians, and frustrated intellectuals to connect, create, and share ideas through zines and self -publishing. Collectively organized by a group of volunteers, TCZF has collaboratively supported this form of design most of ten created by those without traditional, formal design training. Instead, TCZF champions sustainable support of self-publishing and the DIY ethic in local communities, with an intersectional focus on politically and socially engaged zines, community partnership, and amplifying the voices of those who have been historically unheard. Gathering a group of zine makers throughout TCZF’s years, this evening explores the vibrant plurality of voices and perspectives on local zines.
