This spring, the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA), in partnership with Portfolio Center, presents an exhibition honoring history and design through the medium of the chair. Stories in Form: Chair Design by the Portfolio Center runs February 5 through June 3, 2012.

The works featured in Stories in Form are created as part of Portfolio Center’s nationally acclaimed course “Modernism: History, Criticism and Theory,” which explores design history as a catalyst for new design ideas. While learning about Modernism, the history of design and the development of critical thinking skills, students in the course create chairs by means of a design process that combines inspiration from a historical period with personal experience.  This exercise in design is recognized nationwide for the challenge it presents to students, for it compels students to go beyond perfunctory design solutions and to balance old and new, conservative and eccentric, safe and dangerous as they design chairs that re-imagine their personal histories as three-dimensional objects.

Portfolio Center’s groundbreaking class has also been featured in the new book Design School Confidential: Extraordinary Class Projects From the International Design Schools, Colleges, and Institutes by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico. This book features fifty real-world class assignments from top design programs at universities around the world, and examines the resulting student projects.

Each chair on display at MODA will be accompanied by the story of its creation. In addition to demonstrating the step-by-step design process that brings these chairs into being, the exhibition will highlight the ways in which design objects tell stories of design history and personal experience.

At Drink in Design on Thursday, February 23, Full Radius Dance will fill the MODA galleries with movement!

Full Radius is an Atlanta Based dance company comprised of professional dancers with and without physical disabilities.  Dancers don’t view the wheelchair as a hindrance to dance, but instead, it is an extension of the dancer.

Doors open at 6pm; Dance performances will take place throughout the evening.

For more information, click here.

Skate It or Hang It!? will be held at the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) from June 16, 2012 to September 16, 2012.  The exhibition will examine the visual aspects skateboarding, a sport important to contemporary youth culture since the 1970s, by presenting a broad range of styles, imagery, and visual expression in skateboard art.

With a broad focus on skateboard graphics—in particular the styles and methods used to embellish skateboard decks—the exhibition will appeal to a broad range of skateboarders, designers, artists and to Atlanta’s youth in general.  Visitors will come to understand skateboard graphics in a variety of ways, as Skate It or Hang It!? will include:

• A survey of skateboard art from the 1970s through the current day
• Original installations by local artists influenced by skateboard art such as Alex Brewer aka HENSE and Charlie Owens
• Educational activities in which children are invited to design and create their own skateboard decks
• Interviews with VCJ and Jim Phillips, along with personal appearances and art by Sean Cliver, Andy Howell, Wes Humpton, Lance Mountain,  Don Pendleton, and Steve Olson
• An exhibition demonstrating the steps by which skateboard decks are fabricated
• A 9 foot interactive skateboard sticker exhibition

Join us for Drink in Design on Thursday, March 1, as MODA and Portfolio Center present Tess Wicksteed, Strategy Director at Pearlfisher, who will take you on a journey through the step-by-step process used to create a comprehensive branding campaign. Pearlfisher is an international branding company representing clients in the food and beverage industry.

Tess is catalytic in the fusion of brand strategy and creative expression. Clients and colleagues alike rely on her for ideas, knowledge and inspiration, whatever the project. Riddled with academic qualifications (York, Sussex and Cambridge), she entered the world of brands as consultant at The Value Engineers, moving to Pearlfisher in 2000.

As Strategy Director at Pearlfisher, she has masterminded their future insight program, helping Pearlfisher to stay one giant leap ahead of current thinking and developing new ideas about the world of brands in which we work. Although serious when the occasion demands, Tess is keen to keep telling jokes, because when people open their mouths to laugh, she says, they open their minds to think.

Doors open at 5:30pm to give lecture attendees an opportunity to see our current exhibition; lecture begins at 6:30pm.  To purchase advance tickets, click here.  Seats are extremely limited.