Lux et Femina: Women in Graphic Design at Yale will soon be open to everyone.
The exhibition celebrating 70 years of women in graphic design at Yale is currently installed at Haas Library at Yale. Since the library is only open to the Yale campus community, the curators have created a series of online events to further the discussion and make it available to a global audience.
Each event will feature a conversation between two practicing graphic designers. The conversations will address the field of graphic design, the education of graphic designers, and the varied and dynamic careers of Yale’s graphic design graduates.
The first of these takes place on Monday, January 31, featuring Rebecca Gimenez ’07 MFA and Alicia Cheng ’99 MFA. The two alumnae, both featured in Lux et Femina, will join Mar González Palacios on the panel “Women in Graphic Design at Yale: What Can a Graphic Design Career Be?” For the last decade, Gimenez has led a large design and strategy team at IA Collaborative, acting as design leadership in the business sector, and she recently joined Airbnb in a senior role. Cheng and two partners from the Yale MFA program founded the woman-owned design firm MGMT in 2002; she recently joined The Metropolitan Museum of Art as head of design. González Palacios is co-curator of the Lux et Femina exhibition and associate director, special collections, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University Library. González Palacios will lead a discussion about Gimenez and Cheng’s careers as graphic designers and their current work as lead designers at cultural and corporate institutions.
On Monday, February 14, Yeju Choi ’09 MFA and Hannah Smotrich ’91 MFA will join Pamela Hovland ’93 MFA on the panel “Women in Graphic Design at Yale: What is Graphic Design Education?” Choi is critic at Yale School of Art and an artist and designer in New York who works with architecture, installation, publications, and public art. Smotrich is an associate professor at University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design, where her teaching and her practice address participatory practices and community engagement. Hovland is senior critic at Yale School of Art. Hovland will discuss teaching and design education and engagement with Choi and Smotrich.
Closing out the series on Monday, February 21, will be Loidë Marwanga ’10, ’15 MFA and Miko McGinty ’93, ’98 MFA, who will join Betty Wang ’22 MFA on the panel “Women in Graphic Design at Yale: What is Graphic Design?” Marwanga is an independent designer based in the Washington, D.C., area whose design work closely engages art historical, artistic, and cultural content. McGinty is co-curator of the Lux et Femina exhibition and is a book designer and founder of a design firm in Brooklyn whose practice focuses on curatorial, scholarly, and museum publications. She also teaches book design as a lecturer at MIT. Wang is a second-year student in the graphic design MFA program at Yale, having received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Wang will discuss the field of graphic design and the relationship between design and content with Marwanga and McGinty.
