A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

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Melissa Weiss

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Education: BFA, 2010, Pomona College, Claremont, CA; MFA, 2018, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Concurrent Position: Art Director, Verso Books. Curation: Lost&: An Archive of Future Artifacts. Exhibitions: Reading Room Gallery, Providence; RISD Museum, Providence. Publications: Surfaces of Protest, Full Bleed: A Journal of Art & Design.

Personal Statement

Melissa Weiss is an artist, designer, and writer with research interests in feminist theory, ecology, critical optimism, and the archive.

She received a Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Pomona College. She is currently a Visiting Designer in Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an art director for the radical publishing house, Verso Books.

In her ongoing project, Monument for Feeling, Melissa explores her relationship to her family’s past through the lens of a defiant archivist.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This critique seminar explores conceptual and structural configurations of personal and public cultural space. Constructing discourses about social, cultural and political phenomena, students derive content and voice to produce process artifacts that may range from a communications tool (a singular, interactive element) to a communications scenario (a system of urban or media elements). Two projects are given, each using a distinct methodology. Beginning with a focus on personal cultural space, students investigate the influence of mediated messages on the construction of identity using a generative matrix, pairing symbol systems with functions of communication. The semester continues with a focus on public cultural space, as students examine the dynamics of a chosen community using the process of dialogical mapping, developing diagrams that clarify rhetorical and metaphoric relationships within a community. Each methodology introduced in this seminar is inferred from linguistic analysis, intended to reveal and cultivate the complexities within each student's work.

Class Number

1762

Credits

3

Description

This critique seminar explores conceptual and structural configurations of personal and public cultural space. Constructing discourses about social, cultural and political phenomena, students derive content and voice to produce process artifacts that may range from a communications tool (a singular, interactive element) to a communications scenario (a system of urban or media elements). Two projects are given, each using a distinct methodology. Beginning with a focus on personal cultural space, students investigate the influence of mediated messages on the construction of identity using a generative matrix, pairing symbol systems with functions of communication. The semester continues with a focus on public cultural space, as students examine the dynamics of a chosen community using the process of dialogical mapping, developing diagrams that clarify rhetorical and metaphoric relationships within a community. Each methodology introduced in this seminar is inferred from linguistic analysis, intended to reveal and cultivate the complexities within each student's work.

Class Number

1772

Credits

3