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The Studio: Artists in Residence
It is altogether possible to walk through our Art and Design Gallery in the Pomerantz lobby and never notice the glass-encased balcony-like space situated directly over the entrance turnstiles. After all, the gallery is so dazzling and its displays so captivating that your attention is riveted to what is immediately before you. However, for several…
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The Museum at FIT 50th Anniversary
The 50th anniversary party for the Museum at FIT offered a welcome opportunity, in the middle of a dreary February, for celebration. To acknowledge this milestone moment in the museum’s history, its director and chief curator, Valerie Steele, and curator of costume and accessories, Colleen Hill, selected from 33 of the museum’s most influential—and often…
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Bookends: MFA Illustration Exhibition
The remarkable ability of illustration to tell complex, moving stories is on full display at “Bookends,” this year’s exhibition of visual theses by 11 students graduating from FIT’s Master of Fine Arts in Illustration. This is outstanding visual work, full of gripping imagery and engaging narratives. The MFA is a three-year program with classes exclusively during evening…
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Chalk! It Up
At commencement last year, I spoke about the thousands of rush hour commuters on a Washington DC subway platform who never noticed, much less stopped, while world-famous violinist Joshua Bell played Bach. Yet here, on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk outside FIT—at almost any time of day or night—busy passersby are stopping, or at least slowing down, as they notice…
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Claudia Rankine Visits FIT
Poet, playwright, and social commentator Claudia Rankine shared a little inside information with the audience of students and faculty when she appeared in a packed Katie Murphy Amphitheater at FIT to give a talk entitled “The Creative Imagination and Race.” As a high-school student, Ms. Rankine told the rapt audience, she had travelled from her…