Lecture: Silas Munro
Wednesday, November 11 at 3 PM

Remote presentation and conversation hosted by Ideas for Creative Exploration with the support of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America

Silas Munro is a partner of Polymode, a bi-coastal design studio, an 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 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. The project has been featured in articles in Smithsonian Magazine, The New Yorker, and Black Perspectives (African American Intellectual History Society).

Munro’s scholarly research addresses the relationship between designers personal identities, formal systems and strategies they utilize, and how both interact with the communities they serve. 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 (“Major/Minor History”) and to create inclusive new frameworks (“Nodal Historical Network”). His design work 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.

He earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. He has been a critic and lecturer at leading programs including Yale School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art, NC State, RISD, and CalArts. His design studio, Polymode, works with cultural institutions and community based organizations including 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, The New Museum, Wynwood Arts District Miami, and the U.S. Department of States Bureau of Cultural Affairs.