Reverberations: Lineages in Design History features over fifty artists and designers with artworks reflecting rich cultural ancestries through pattern, type, technique, form and beyond. On view March 4 through May 3, the exhibition transforms the gallery into an expansive educational space, reimagining design history to feature Indigenous, Black and People of Color designers and cultural figures.

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Published in IMPULSE Magazine  | March 13, 2025

Visual Lineages

By Sterling Corum

Text and dialogue play a key role in understanding culture through linear, traditional learning structure, but Reverberations: Lineages in Design History explore beyond the expected. It is a modicum of learning materials mixed with interactive elements, proving that visual design patterns can be viable tools for understanding how design fits into our lives across generations. Its classroom of works reimagines the medium of protest and dissent, from typical motifs of picket signs to the hints of oppression used in traditional woven Māori panels to the digital reliquary of BIPOC design history, a series of online lectures by Polymode that inspired the exhibition. While this may sound academically rigorous, what you’ll find inside the gallery’s quaint walls is actually a collection that spans lifetimes and speaks for itself, which it now has to. There are no attributions or captions posted next to any of the art pieces—a move that subverts the traditional gallery structure and forces viewers to make connections and absorb each work’s visual impact independently, putting poetry, textile, graphic design, and 3D-printed ceramic all on the same playing field. Read full feature here

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Published in Forbes  | March 26, 2025

This Artist Creates Fake Passports That Deconstruct Colonial Narratives

By R. Daniel Foster

How did one little booklet come to signify so much? Passports are powerful symbols of identity, nationality and belonging—bestowing privileges of global mobility. Need to escape political unrest, war or personal danger? Your passport is your ticket out, an entry to a better life.

Artist Pilar Castillo has taken note, creating counterfeit passports that critique oppressive colonial powers. The hyper-real fakes are built around timelines of countries’ socio-political histories. Alterations—some subtle and others overt—expose historical injustices. Read full feature here

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Published in STIRworld  | April 2, 2025

‘Reverberations’ reframes narratives of BIPOC design history from a pluriversal lens

By Asmita Singh

Design, like culture, can never stand to be neutral—it often upholds existing power structures or dares to disrupt them. Reverberations: Lineages in Design History, the group exhibition at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York, makes this tension its central premise. The exhibition offers an educational space reimagining narratives of design traditions, with Indigenous, Black and POC voices as central to its history. From provocative displays of visual and spatial installations to interactive augmented reality experiences imagining a more equitable future, Reverberations is on view at the gallery from March 4 – May 3, 2025. Read full feature here

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Published in Hyperallergic  | April 20, 2025

A Vision of Design That Transcends Empire’s Grid

By Petala Ironcloud

Western design has long obeyed the dicta of fin de siècle and early 20th-century Berlin and Paris — that ornament is crime, that form follows function, that clarity trumps complexity. Non-European traditions, however, weren’t peripheral influences to design, but rather systems with their own complex codes. Slipping past the now-famous glass-enclosed forest at the Ford Foundation, I felt the water rippling toward something percussive, living, and deeply modern in Reverberations: Lineages in Design History. The exhibition traces design’s pulse across Indigenous, Black, and other historically marginalized cultures — not as isolated oases, but as multiple continuous and resounding centers. Read full feature here

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Published in Hyperallergic  | April 20, 2025

The Best New York City Exhibitions of 2025

Curators Brian Johnson and Silas Munro helped forge a new syllabus of BIPOC design history with this landmark show that highlighted the energy that binds movements and influences identities around the world. As much a celebration of new languages as a taxonomy of established ones, this is sure to be an exhibition that is revisited again and again. —Hrag Vartanian. See the full list here