Assembly 2021

Getting to Know the Place

Tuesday June 8, 3pm PST
A Graduate Lecture by Jordan Rosenblum

In this artist talk, Jordan Rosenblum will discuss recent work, focusing on participatory projects that explore how we make meaning of our environments. These include New School Signs working with elementary school students to design signs to reinterpret their school, Interpreting Place: The Five Oaks a university class created in collaboration with the Five Oaks Museum to interpret a historic site paradoxically situated in a business park, and Untitled (Historic Home Placards) a project collaborating with a group of university students to write autobiographical historic plaques for their childhood homes. Working primarily with students in a classroom context, each of these projects play with common, public forms of communication—including signage systems, maps, historical markers, and interpretive exhibits—to create complex biographies of a place. The lecture is associated with a graduate exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, an online exhibition at the Five Oaks Museum titled What Makes a Place?, and a workshop at this year’s Assembly conference on Friday, June 11th, offered in collaboration with Laura Glazer titled Place Biographies.

Jordan Rosenblum works as a socially engaged artist, designer, and educator. His projects include workshops, installations, and publications. He teaches at Portland State University, works as a visual designer, and co-directs the RECESS! Design Studio (in affiliation with the King School Museum of Contemporary Art)—an artist project that explores the power of design with elementary school students. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice program.