School Notes: School of Art
July/August 2008

Art faculty win national design awards

Two faculty members from the School of Art have been chosen to receive 2008 National Design Awards from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. The National Design Awards were established to promote excellence and innovation in design, and are accompanied each year by a variety of public education programs, special events, panel discussions, and workshops.

Michael Bierut, a partner in the New York design firm Pentagram and a senior critic in Yale's graphic design program, is the recipient of the Design Mind Award, which recognizes visionary individuals or firms that have affected a shift in design thinking or practice through writing, research, and scholarship. Bierut is co-editor of the Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design book series and a cofounder of DesignObserver.com, a widely read blog focused on design and culture.

Scott Stowell is the winner of the Communications Design Award, which honors work in graphic or multimedia design. Stowell, a critic in graphic design at Yale, operates Open, an independent New York-based design studio that works across a range of media.

The award recipients will be honored at a gala dinner October 23 at the Cooper-Hewitt in New York City.

Professor elected to American Academy

Mel Bochner, retired professor (adjunct) of printmaking and painting, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. Bochner has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and his work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Musee National D'Art Moderne in Paris. He is one of nine Yale faculty members to be chosen for the 2008 class of fellows. (For more on the other Yale-affiliated AAAS fellows, see "Honored.")

Honors for Art School alumni

Two recent graduates of the School of Art have been recognized with prizes in the arts. Marc Trujillo ’94MFA has been named a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, joining such past fellows as Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, and Martha Graham. An art professor at Santa Monica College, Trujillo has exhibited his work nationwide and it has been featured in numerous publications. Canadian photographer Sarah Anne Johnson ’04MFA is the winner of the inaugural Grange Prize for Contemporary Photography, awarded by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Canadian firm Aeroplan. A native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Johnson has shown her work in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the United States.