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2006 Yale Graphic Design mfa Show, May 17 – 24, 2006

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The Graphic Design Department at The Yale School of Art, the first graphic design program of its kind in the country, will hold its 2006 MFA Thesis Show from 17 - 24, 2006. The opening reception will be held on May 20, 2006 from 6-9 pm in the school’s main gallery, located at 1156 Chapel St. in New Haven, CT. This landmark event will highlight the work of fifteen graduating students from around the globe.
Yale’s three-floor exhibition space will be covered with over 10,000 8.5×11 inch paper tiles of students’ work. “Faced with the challenge of displaying work out of context and in an open white volume, students chose an 8.5×11 grid as a way to create a context that is at once autonomous and mutual,” says Dan Michaelson, faculty advisor and 2002 graduate of Yale’s Graphic Design program. “The 8.5×11 grid is a metaphor for the comp, the rough draft, the transmitted document, the electronic screen and the time-based process of the installation. For us, 8.5×11 has been a set of collaborative tactics, human as well as technical in their execution, and a mathematical approach to budgetary limits. The students’ grid has been an experiment to create a system that encompasses work as small as a letterform and as large as an exhibition hall.”

The intense, two-year program focuses on the development of a thesis: a cumulative process through which a coherent, investigative, and experimental body of work is built. “The design program at Yale is always in the process of becoming. Its always on the verge of a breakthrough that somehow turns out to be the verge of another breakthrough. Its all these things because it is, at its heart, a collection of highly motivated and extremely creative young men and women intent on dismantling and rebuilding their approach to their subject and rethinking the profession of design from the roots up,” says Michael Rock, associate professor at Yale and partner of the graphic design studio 2×4. The 2006 Graphic Design candidates are: Lana Cavar, Yoonjai Choi, Michung Chun, Ian Dapot, Aliza Dzik, Dylan Fracareta, Greenblatt, Thomas Griffiths, Geoffrey Han, Laitsz Ho, Elizabeth Shim, Sung Bae Son, Mark Unger, Jayme Yen and Forest Young. 

Founded in 1701, Yale University is located in New Haven, Connecticut. Its School of Art, created in 1869, was the first connected with an institution of higher learning in the US. Since 1869, critics within the Graphic Design program have included Paul Rand, Alexey Brodovich, Herbert Mattter, and Bradbury Thompson. The 2006 Graphic Design candidates’ critics included Irma Boom, Karel Martens, Michael Beirut, Rock, Matthew Carter, Linda van Deursen, Armand Mevis, Alexander Isley, and the Graphic Design department’s Director Sheila Levrant de Bretteville.