A roundup of ideas and projects from around the Institute
For the final week of LGBTQ+ Pride Month, artist and illustrator Nicole Rifkin, BFA Communications Design (Illustration) ’14, contributed cover art for The New Yorker depicting a reflective, intimate moment of self-presentation and pride: “When I was at Pratt, I visited Desert Island, a gallery/store where I first saw the work of Charles Burns, Jordan Crane, Adrian Tomine, and the Hernandez brothers … I became deeply immersed in those comics, and in finding unique ways of telling stories.”
Lucy Clary, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’28, won the ‘paint out’ at the Evanston Plein Art Festival.
Pratt is included in the Princeton Review Guide to Green Colleges: 2025 Edition that features sustainability and other information from 511 schools.
Visiting Professor in the School of Information Bill Levay, MSLIS ’15, presented at the Archivists Round Table symposium. He spoke about managing and migrating digital collections in recent years at the New York Philharmonic Archives.
A film by Max Drexler, BFA Film ’24, will premiere at the London Short Film Festival in January. The film, titled Phillips, is “about the role of the documentarian and the meaning of truth in today’s world.”
Pratt received a $10,000 Bridging the Gap on Campus grant, funded by Interfaith America, for The Art of Listening, a forthcoming professional development series led by Vivian D’Andrade, director of diversity, equity and inclusion, Justin Kelley, assistant vice president and dean of students, and Emma Legge, director of student involvement. The Art of Listening is designed to reach supervisors and student employees across Pratt, emphasizing the importance of active listening skills to enhance communication, foster trust, and work across perceived and actual differences.
Jojo Buchmann, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’28, was among GrowHouse NYC’s 2024 Youth Design Competition winners for her piece Know Who You Are. “If we can see art as a gateway to transforming our perspectives, imagine how much change can happen in one individual, and then imagine society as a whole,” said Buchmann.
Landscapes of Retreat by Rosetta S. Elkin, academic director of the landscape architecture program, won The John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize. “The purpose of this prize is to reward contributors to the intellectual vitality of garden history and landscape studies.”
Ik-Joong Kang, MFA Fine Arts ’88, is the first Korean artist to participate in Forever Is Now, an exhibition set amidst the Pyramids of Giza. The exhibition news is featured in Hypebeast, Design Boom, The Art Newspaper, and Korea.net. Kang is also featured in Fad Magazine for his 700-foot-tall work at the Korean Cultural Center New York.
Dr. Yuliya Dzyuban, assistant professor in the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, has been appointed to the Fifth New York Panel on Climate Change, “an independent advisory body that synthesizes scientific information on climate change and advises city policymakers on local resiliency and adaptation strategies that protect against extreme heat, heavy rain, coastal storm surge, and other climate hazards.” Dzyuban, the first full-time faculty member in the Sustainable Environmental Systems program, specializes in studying the impacts of rising temperatures in cities and helps to develop nature-based solutions that improve climate resilience.
