“All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design?” - Octavia Butler 

Breaking into the art world is no small task. Learn from accomplished leaders how to navigate the complexities and carve out a niche for your artistic expression. Parsons faculty members Jennifer Rittner and Kelly Walters will speak with the owners of The Bishop Gallery, Stevenson Dunn and E. John. Together, they will explore topics such as art collection, curatorial practices, and the unique experience of emerging in the vibrant landscape of New York City. Join us in the discourse on making space and flourishing as emerging artists, designers, and curators.

The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection presents the work of six editors and over 70 designers, artists, curators, educators, students, and researchers who represent a wide cross-section of Black diasporic identities and multi-disciplinary practices. Our writers spotlight teaching practices, offer critiques of design methods, and shed light on Black interventions in speculative futuring, sustainable design methods, healing practices, activisms, and designing for Black Joy. They write about multi-community design, biophilia as a Black reparative practice, the history of African fractals, and the intersections of race, gender, ability, and sexuality as it informs their teaching, scholarship and professional work.

The Bishop Gallery aims to provide emerging and established artists with an intimate space to connect with their audience and the expanding Brooklyn art scene. We embrace all artists of varying cultures, genres and means of artistic expression. We hope to forge a lasting relationship with the artists who show in our space and the surrounding communities. Art can be a catalyst for bringing together communities and inciting conversations of change and development. We want to be the venue, where the ideas that bring about change happens.

The Parsons Scholars Institute at The New School currently comprises two social justice and mentorship programs called the Parsons Scholars Program and the Parsons Scholars Mentor Fellowship. Since 1997, these programs work in tandem as vital access initiatives that seek to counterbalance barriers that students of color encounter in their pursuit of higher education and career opportunities in the fields of art and design. The Parsons Scholars Institute seeks to change access and persistence narratives for communities marginalized along racial and income lines via community support and radical forms of access provided to the students we serve.