2017–2018 Public Seminar Series: Andrew Blauvelt

UIC School of Design
2017–2018 Public Seminar Series: Through a Glass Darkly
Andrew Blauvelt

Andrew Blauvelt is a designer, curator, writer, and educator. Since 2015, he has served as Director of the Cranbrook Art Museum. For 17 years, he held a number of positions at the Walker Art Center, including Design Director, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, and Chief of Communications and Audience Engagement. At the Walker, he served as creative director of its progressive design identity and developed its award-winning publishing program, both in print and online. Blauvelt has also led the graphic design program at NC State University; served as a tutor at the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands; and served as interim head of 2D Design at Cranbrook Academy, where he received his MFA in Design.

Blauvelt combines the roles of curator, author, editor, art director, and exhibition designer through major museum exhibitions and their accompanying publications, including: Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics (2018); Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (2015); and Graphic Design: Now in Production (2011). He organized and edited the publication, Parallel Cities: The Multilevel Metropolis (DAP, 2016), which traces a transhistorical and multicultural history of the elevated pedestrian network in urban spaces. He will visit CADA to discuss the parameters of design as a practice and alternative models for the profession in which designers develop their own agendas and territories.

The UIC School of Design public seminar series serves as a research platform for the school’s MDES program, stimulating broad intellectual inquiry about the values guiding the designer by promoting discourse across industrial and graphic design.