Gallery Talk: Success and Failure with Michael Rakowitz and Elizabeth Tunstall
Featured image
Beaumont Newhall, Fuller with students, constructing dome from Venetian blinds at Black Mountain College, summer 1948
About
In this series, artists, filmmakers, designers, architects, ecologists, anthropologists, and educators consider Buckminster Fuller’s legendary work and enduring influence in thematic explorations of the exhibition.
Artist Michael Rakowitz and design anthropologist Elizabeth Tunstall discuss Fuller’s successes and failures.
About the Speakers
Michael Rakowitz is an artist who founded paraSite, an ongoing project to custom-build inflatable shelters for homeless people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building's heating, ventilation, or air conditioning system. His work has been exhibited at major exhibitions worldwide, and his recent public project, Return, was presented by Creative Time in New York. He received a 2008 Creative Capital Grant for a collaboration with Emna Zghal and is also a contributing editor for Surface Tension: A Journal on Spatial Arts.
Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a design anthropologist, strategic planner, and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a leader in bringing together the fields of anthropology and design, as she uses her background to help clients make better decisions by grounding their business and design assumptions in people's actual attitudes, behaviors, and actions. Her clients have included the US Army and Army Reserves, Sears, General Motors, and Nokia. Tunstall is associate director of the City Design Center and is active with Design for Democracy, a nonprofit that increases civic participation using interdisciplinary design and research teams.