Block Party

Department of Play (Katarzyna Balug and Maria Lucia Vidart)

Installation Team: Nora Chuff, Fiona Kenney with Sarah Diamond

Reproduced for Women in Design for Convergence

Block Party reimagines the building block as an assemblage of two interlinking units. The block units are made of lightweight, resilient foam and fit together to create airy, curvilinear shapes of limitless size. Shapes are limited only by collaborators' imagination in free play, but the system has capacity to produce a space-filling polyhedron if blocks are arranged in a 1:2 ratio by alternating the "x" and "y" shapes at right angles.

Department of Play is an art collective co-founded by Katarzyna Balug and Maria Lucia Vidart, which creates ‘temporary play zones’ in public space: opportunities to step out of the everyday and inhabit imagined worlds. Participants envision alternative futures and collaboratively create artifacts from those futures, while asking uncomfortable questions and sharing life experience and knowledge. The collective posits the city as a malleable, continuous construction that emerges out of countless moments of experimentation by any and all of its inhabitants. The works shown here were funded by ArtPlace America in 2016.

Dinner Party

Team: Ciara Stein (MLA I, MUP 21) with GSD students

An exhibit at 40 Kirkland Gallery to correspond with the Convergence

Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party is  a widely celebrated artwork housed at the Brooklyn Museum in the  Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The piece consists of a large  banquet arranged in the shape of an open triangle. Thirty-nine  individualized place settings and sculpted plates are set  for ‘guests of honor’ and a further 999 names are inscribed in gold on  the surrounding porcelain tiles. Among those invited to the table are  ancient Greek poet Sappho, Queen Elizabeth I, Sojourner Truth, Susan B.  Anthony and Georgia O’Keeffe.

While Judy Chicago’s piece focuses on celebrating the role of women in Western civilization and uses  a language of vaginal imagery to do so, we invite you to interpret and challenge this to bring about an inclusive dinner party and  resulting archive. Moreover, the piece has been criticized for its essentialism, as such we challenge you to define who your dinner guest  is by applying your own values and definition of who a designer is.