Radical Prescience Silas Munro on W E B DuBois’s Data Portraits

Silas Munro - founder of Polymode design studio and an Associate Professor at Otis College of Art and Design - revisits his tour de force lecture on W.E.B. DuBois’s groundbreaking data visualizations following the recent anti-racism uprisings and the increasing visibility and support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Silas Munro is a partner of Polymode, a bi-coastal design studio, creating poetic, and research-informed design with clients in the cultural sphere and community-based organizations. Clients of Polymode include MoMA, The Phillips Collection, Mark Bradford at the Venice Biennale, The Center for Urban Pedagogy, Walker Art Center, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, ICA at Virginia Commonwealth University, and The New Museum. Munro also serves as Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and Advisor, Founding Faculty, and Chair Emeritus at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In the past year he has emerged as one of the most exciting practitioners of community-engaged design and as an influential scholar known for his contributions to W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America published by Princeton Architectural Press in late 2018. In workshops and lectures he addresses post-colonial relationships between design and marginalized communities and offers practical ways for educators and practitioners to decolonize the way design is taught and to create inclusive new frameworks. His design and writing has been published in books, exhibitions, and websites in Germany, Japan, Korea, the US, and the UK including Chronicle Books, IDEA magazine, Eye, and Slanted magazine. Munro earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.

Join the Brown Arts Initiative and Data Science Initiative for a series of conversations at the intersection of data science and design with a focus on social justice. In the words of Ramon Tejada, founder of the Decolonizing Design Reader, “The histories of these fields, with their respective exclusionary practices and methods, demonstrate complicity in creating the societal problem we face today. Many of these issues raise uncomfortable concepts that we all need to work through in our own individual practices as scientists, designers, and human beings.” Acknowledging moments of convergence, these interdisciplinary talks seek to generate new collaborations at Brown and beyond while acknowledging that data and design are not neutral.
_________
Check out our website to see all of our programing:

Follow us!