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.

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.

For more information about the exhibition and associated events, click here.