Sep 26, 2024

PRATT FACULTY STANDOUT IN VENICE

Members of Pratt’s faculty are currently exhibiting their work at esteemed Venetian venues. Visiting Associate Professor of Interior Design and Undergraduate Architecture Nina Freedman is showing work at the European Cultural Centre (ECC) Art Biennial. The ECC, founded in 2002, organizes art and architecture exhibitions, symposia, and a wide range of cultural projects worldwide. Its exhibitions in Venice are visited by over 600,000 people each year. Now in its seventh year, the ECC Art Biennial in Venice runs concurrently with The Venice Biennale.

Nina Freedman’s interactive installation Face-Ade: The Human Landscape is on view as part of the ECC Art Biennale’s exhibition Personal Structures | Beyond Boundaries. Using diverse hair waste collected from New York City neighborhood hair salons, the piece transforms a typical private home facade into an intimate and translucent “skin” in order to explore how domestic architectural symbols can speak to belonging and vulnerability. The pigmented and transparent bio-resin wall studs, contoured with human profiles, rotate in a wood structure and simultaneously function like “exterior cladding” when closed. The installation prompts viewers to consider the narratives and identities concealed behind the facades in our neighborhoods. It asks, who lives behind these walls? How do we, in our differences, live together? Face-Ade: The Human Landscape will be open until November 24, 2024, at the Palazzo Mora.

The topic of home is part of both her personal art practice as well as her work as an educator. “In my design studios, I try to help students use their work as a compassionate lens on issues they believe in, or are part of their experience,” Freedman said. “While a ‘home’ might seem like a microcosm of experience, it is the seed of a wider metaphorical narrative which touches all spheres of life. The dialogue opportunities about this in class, here in NYC, with an international student body, are culturally and experientially rich, contributing to amazing design possibilities.”

Freedman, a NYSCA 2024 Grantee, is an interdisciplinary architect, artist, educator, and host of the podcast Whereing, which, like much of her work, explores belonging, design, and home. She is the founder and principal of Dreamland Creative Projects and is currently working on a memoir which considers what one loses and gains in order to belong, and what one loses and gains when one decides not to. Recently, she designed a miniature bio-resin jewelry collection called Conversations based on the human profiles in Face-Ade.

Face-Ade is supported by Pratt Institute School of Design, Pratt Institute Department of Interior Design, Production Labs at the School of Design, Pratt Institute Sponsorship for NYSCA Grant, The New School, and Puffin Foundation.