Our Design Talks lecture series returns for the fall season. This month’s speaker, Dr. Cheryl D. Miller will present “Illuminatiing DuBois, Examining the Legacy of a Sociologist Historian, Through Research and Design.”

Doors open at 7pm and lecture begins at dusk. Click the button to register for $5 donation to AIA Austin. Refreshments and light snack included.

More about this month’s presentation:

Dr. Cheryl D. Miller reveals how the impact of W.E.B. Dubois' legacy scholarship leads to important findings which verify her instincts. The first presence of the Black graphic designer was enslaved and traveled from West Africa directly to the colonial printshops in America. More than the designer of his 1900 Paris Exhibition Data Visualization Charts, DuBois' work points to the History of the Black Designer in North America. Dr. Miller, now decolonizes the graphic design canon with these truths and more! Her lecture was first given for the Smithsonian Institute; this sound bite will expand our thinking about design history to include more than the Euro centric Modernist design canonical histories we regard as traditional. As a revisionist and decolonizing historian, her findings and her story are truly inspirational.

About Dr. Cheryl D. Millier

Graphic designer, educator and author Cheryl D. Miller aims to end the marginalization of BIPOC designers through her civil rights activism, industry exposé trade writing, rigorous research and archival vision. A nationally recognized advocate for equity and inclusion in graphic design and founder of the NYC social impact design firm Cheryl D. Miller Design, Inc. She currently serves as Professor of DEI in communication design at Art Center College of Design, Distinguished Senior Lecturer in design at the University of Texas–Austin (where she was the 2021 E.W. Doty fellow) and adjunct professor at Howard University and University of Connecticut. In 2021 she was an AIGA Medalist “Expanding Access,” a Cooper Hewitt “Design Visionary” awardee and an Honorary IBM Design Scholar, “Eminent Luminary.” She is a former member of the Board of Trustees of Vermont College of Fine Arts and the President’s Global Advisory Board of Maryland Institute College of Art. She completed Freshman Foundation studies at The Rhode Island School of Design. She earned a BFA in Graphic Design from Maryland Institute College of Art, an MS in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary and an honorary degree in Humane Letters from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Doctor of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design and The Pratt Institute. Her essays appear in PRINT and Communication Arts, and her D&I-related professional research is archived in the Cheryl D. Miller Collection at Stanford University and Herb Lubalin Study Center, Cooper Union.

Design Talks @ Articulture is presented by the Austin Foundation for Architecture in collaboration with venue sponsor Articulture Designs, event sponsor Builders FirstSource, and series founder/organizer Scott Harvey.