Join DS4SI for a Curatorial Conversation on Scenography and Witness with Ayako Maruyama, 20Q Hub Curator, and Judith Leemann, Thought Ecology Lead.
Each week, the 20 Questions curators invite guests and studio staff into a conversation centered on the themes for their respective weekends. All events are free and open to the public.
More about Ayako Maruyama
Ayako Maruyama is a Filipina-Japanese designer, teacher, and illustrator. She centers intentional collaboration, reflection, maintenance, and repair in her practice. Ayako is the 20Q Hub Curator, directing the design of the space that will house DS4SI’s 20th year celebrations and programming this fall.
Her practice has been shaped by her work with DS4SI where she joined Lori and Kenny in 2012. Her early work focused on designing and producing Action Lab, the first of many DS4SI Creative Labs. She led the design and production of the Go Boston 2030 Visioning Lab, an unprecedented public space for Boston residents to express their vision for the city’s 15-year transportation plan. She grew to be the Design Lead until 2019, and continues to work with the Studio. Ayako co-authored and co-illustrated Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice, which offers a framework for imagining new arrangements. Ayako’s work with DS4SI on Social Emergency Response Centers has been exhibited at Project Row Houses Round 48: Beyond Social Practice and the Designing Peace exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, which traveled to The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.
Ayako currently teaches the Fanned Obsolescence Studio that ties into her research on repair culture in the Philippines, the future of coolin, and the geopolitics of our manufacturing legacy. She collaborates on a project with Markus Berger, called reharvest repair: a circular economy research project. She is a Board Member at the University of Orange in New Jersey, a free school of restoration urbanism founded in 2008 and building on a 64-year history of progressive organizing. Ayako has taught at Boston University’s City Planning and Urban Affairs graduate program and is currently a professor of Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design.
More about Judith Leemann
Judith Leemann is an artist, educator, and writer. Through material, textual, and social inquiry, her practice tracks an urgent curiosity about how form does, how habit makes and breaks, and how we carve out conditions for sustained collective study. Judith was one of DS4SI’s early artists-in-residence back in 2007, and after almost twenty years of parallel play, she has taken on the role of Ecologies of Thought Lead. In this position, she continues to develop protocols for inquiry and reimagination: hack a diagram, question bending, close reading, and more.
Recent solo projects include a commissioned performance for the 2019 exhibition goat island archive—we have discovered the performance by making it at the Chicago Cultural Center, and a site-responsive work for the 2019 Even thread [has] a speech exhibition at the Kohler Art Center. Her writings have been included in the anthologies Beyond Critique (Bloomsbury, 2017), Collaboration Through Craft (Bloomsbury, 2013), as well as in several publications of the Warren Wilson MA in Critical Craft Studies program.
In 2017, she convened the retooling critique working group—a community of practice committed to studying studio critique’s relation to educational equity. She is in her final year as a student in the Boston Conservatory Alexander Technique Teacher Training and serves as a professor in the 3D Arts Department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.