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Congratulations to ������ý faculty Steve Jones and Martin Venezky who, along with Emily Pilloton-Lam, received 2022 AIGA SF Continuum Fellow awards. AIGA, the professional association for design, focuses on design as a profession and as a cultural asset that serves practitioners across design disciplines, as well as teachers and students with national and local chapters. Continuum is AIGA SF’s annual award ceremony that recognizes those who positively impact our Bay Area creative community, through their significant contributions of service, professional achievement, leadership, and education.

“My client base is primarily nonprofits, communities of color, and small businesses. This kind of work is often overlooked, or not as respected. I’ve been told that I need to make work that is ‘sexier.’ Of course I’ve fought against that,” says Jones. “One of my criticisms of the profession is that by default, as a Black designer you’re on the outside in graphic design. It’s generally not very inclusive, so it’s good to be acknowledged,” he adds.

Martin Venezky teaches in MFA Design at ������ý and produces exhibitions, print media and books using drawing, collage, photography and sculpture. Venezky was surprised to get the call from AIGA, “I’ve sometimes felt like an outsider to the design community, especially in San Francisco where the work is so web focused. Getting acknowledged from within the community is a really nice thing. I like to consider design less as a business and more as a way of looking at the world, a way of thinking. Within our program [MFA Design] I can have those conversations, but out in the professional world it’s a lot harder to talk about design like that.” He was introduced by Jon Sueda, chair of MFA Design, who described being Venezky’s student decades ago: “His approach was thought of as strange and unconventional, and to be honest ruffled some feathers, but was also completely inspiring and exciting to myself and so many other students.”

The fluidity of disciplines in Venezky’s work also keeps him from feeling completely at home in any one circle. “I’m a real believer in cross-disciplinary learning. It’s something that’s easy to say, but harder to actually do. And it’s something we really get at in our program.” In the spring he’ll teach a course that intersects typography and photography, focused on “developing new skills and integrating them.”

Thinking about the cohort of fellows, Venezky can see through lines of stepping up to and over thresholds. “Girls Garage,” he says, describing Pilloton-Lam’s organization, “is about getting them comfortable around using tools.” And Jones’s work in the classroom and his studio is about developing a social consciousness. “Maybe that is part of what unites the group, the idea of us all trying to open up possibilities for people who never thought of themselves as capable in that way,” says Venezky.

Public awards and professional organizations can shape and direct what the field focuses on and recognizes as legitimate. An award is a statement of value; it reveals the agenda of the institution that gives it. If AIGA is indeed casting more widely, it is an important tell-tale of the rich pluriverse that design can be—one in which we recognize and celebrate the work of Black designers, image makers that expand and cross disciplines, and designers committed to building a just and accessible future for us all.

—Saraleah Fordyce, faculty, Critical Studies and MFA Design
January 12, 2023