Damon Rich

Last updated
Damon Rich
Nationality American
Alma mater Columbia University
Known for Installation art, Urban Design
Movement Social Practice
Awards2017 MacArthur Genius Grant

Damon Rich (born 1975 in Creve Coeur, Missouri) is a Newark, New Jersey-based designer, urban planner, and visual artist known for investigating the politics of the built environment. He attended Deep Springs College and received a B.A. (1997) from Columbia College of Columbia University. [1] [2] His work looks at the shaping of the world through laws, finance, and politics. He explains his approach as follows: "My exhibitions function as a kind of case study or experiment; each begins with a group of investigators who know little about the subject at hand, acting as stand-ins for the general public." [3] In 1997, Rich founded the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a New York City-based nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to improve civic engagement. [4]

Rich served as the Planning Director & Chief Urban Designer for the City of Newark, New Jersey, from 2008 to 2015 where he led the design and construction of the city's first riverfront parks, was founding director of the city's first public art program, and was primary author of the city's first new zoning law since 1954. [5] He now serves as partner with design and planning practice Hector. [6] [7]

Rich was the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2017. [1]

Related Research Articles

Parsons School of Design Private art and design college in New York

Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is one of the five colleges of The New School.

Rhode Island School of Design Private art and design college in Providence, Rhode Island

The Rhode Island School of Design is a private art and design school in Providence, Rhode Island. The school was founded as a coeducational institution in 1877 by Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf, who sought to increase the accessibility of design education to women. Today, RISD offers bachelor's and master's degree programs across 19 majors and enrolls approximately 2,000 undergraduate and 500 graduate students. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum—which houses the school's art and design collections—is one of the largest college art museums in the United States.

Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York City, also known simply as GSAPP, is regarded as one of the most important and prestigious architecture schools in the world. It is also home to the well-regarded Masters of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design, Historic Preservation, Real Estate Development, Urban Design, and Urban Planning.

Lee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist. In the 1960s and 1970s, Friedlander evolved an influential and often imitated visual language of urban "social landscape," with many of his photographs including fragments of store-front reflections, structures framed by fences, posters and street signs.

Harvard Graduate School of Design Academic department of Harvard University

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is a graduate school of design at Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the GSD offers master's and doctoral programs in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, urban design, real estate, design engineering, and design studies.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro is an American interdisciplinary design studio that integrates architecture, the visual arts, and the performing arts. Based in New York City, Diller Scofidio + Renfro is led by four partners – Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Charles Renfro, and Benjamin Gilmartin – who work with a staff of architects, artists, designers, and researchers.

April Greiman

April Greiman is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s." According to design historian Steven Heller, “April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital.” “She is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design.” Her art combines her Swiss design training with West Coast postmodernism.

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to improve the quality of public participation in urban planning and community design.

Jeanne Gang American architect

Jeanne Gang is an American architect and the founder and leader of Studio Gang, an architecture and urban design practice with offices in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. Gang was first widely recognized for the Aqua Tower, the tallest woman-designed building in the world at the time of its completion. Aqua has since been surpassed by the nearby St. Regis Chicago, also of her design. Surface has called Gang one of Chicago's most prominent architects of her generation, and her projects have been widely awarded.

Teresita Fernández is a New York-based visual artist best known for her public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by landscape and natural phenomena as well as diverse historical and cultural references. Her sculptures present spectacular optical illusions and evoke natural phenomena, land formations, and water in its infinite forms.

Carrie Mae Weems is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project The Kitchen Table Series. Her photographs, films and videos focus on serious issues facing African Americans today, including racism, sexism, politics and personal identity.

Dawoud Bey is an American photographer and educator known for his large-scale art photography and street photography portraits, including American adolescents in relation to their community, and other often marginalized subjects. In 2017, Bey was named a fellow and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is regarded as one of the "most innovative and influential photographers of his generation".

Joyce J. Scott is an African-American artist, sculptor, quilter, performance artist, installation artist, print-maker, lecturer and educator. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2016, and a Smithsonian Visionary Artist in 2019, Scott is best known for her figurative sculptures and jewelry using free form, off-loom beadweaving techniques, similar to a peyote stitch. Each piece is often constructed using thousands of glass seed beads or pony beads, and sometimes other found objects or materials such as glass, quilting and leather. In 2018, she was hailed for working in new medium — a mixture of soil, clay, straw, and cement — for a sculpture meant to disintegrate and return to the earth. Scott is influenced by a variety of diverse cultures, including Native American and African traditions, Mexican, Czech, and Russian beadwork, illustration and comic books, and pop culture.

Rick Lowe

Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist and community organizer, whose Project Row Houses is considered an important example of social-practice art. In 2014, he was among the 21 people awarded a MacArthur "genius" fellowship.

Denyse Thomasos

Denyse Thomasos was a Trinidadian-Canadian painter known for her abstract-style wall murals that conveyed themes of slavery, confinement and the story of African and Asian Diaspora. "Hybrid Nations" (2005) is one of her most notable pieces that features Thomasos' signature use of dense thatchwork patterning and architectural influence to portray images of American superjails and traditional African weavework.

Matthew Desmond American sociologist

Matthew Desmond is an American sociologist and the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab.

Jordan Casteel is an American figurative painter. Casteel typically paints intimate portraits of friends, lovers, and family members as well as neighbors and strangers in Harlem and New York. Casteel lives and works in New York City.

Elizabeth Diller American architect

Elizabeth Diller, also known as Liz Diller, is an American architect and partner in Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which she co-founded in 1979. She is also an architecture professor at Princeton University.

Emmanuel Pratt is an American Urban Designer. In 2009 he co-founded the Sweet Water Foundation, which practices "Regenerative Neighborhood Development" on the South Side of Chicago. The foundation is centered around bringing inter-generational members of the community together for education and to work on urban agriculture and reclaiming abandoned properties and transforming them into productive landscapes.

V. Mitch McEwen is an American architect and urban planner, cultural activist, and Assistant Professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture. She is Principal of McEwen Studio and co-founder of Atelier Office, a design and cultural practice working within the fields of urbanism, technology, and the arts. McEwen is a co-founder and member of the Black Reconstruction Collective and a board member of the Van Alen Institute in New York. She was nominated for a United States Artists Fellowship and given the 2010 New York State Council on the Arts Independent Projects Award for Architecture, Planning and Design.

References

  1. 1 2 "Damon Rich - MacArthur Foundation". www.macfound.org. Retrieved 2020-06-25.
  2. "Damon Rich '97 Named 2017 MacArthur "Genius"". Columbia College Today. Winter 2017. Archived from the original on 2018-06-24. Retrieved June 25, 2020.
  3. "Damon Rich discusses his exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art". www.artforum.com. Retrieved 2020-06-25.
  4. "CUP: About". url. Archived from the original on 2012-01-27. Retrieved 2020-06-25.
  5. Tianga, Keli A. (2018-02-07). "An Interview with Damon Rich, a 2017 MacArthur Genius". Shelterforce. Retrieved 2020-06-25.
  6. "HECTOR". HECTOR. Retrieved 2020-06-25.
  7. "The LOEB Fellowship | Conversation with Damon Rich". The LOEB Fellowship. Retrieved 2020-06-25.