The Mt. San Jacinto College (MSJC) Art Gallery is pleased to welcome the public to its next online Art Talk on April 14, featuring Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, a design, architecture, artist, and activist duo based in the Bay Area.
The MSJC Art Talk, generously sponsored by the MSJC Foundation, will take place from 1 to 2 p.m. April 14. Details are available at www.msjc.edu/artgallery.
Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello’s work ranges from the political to the playful and often a combination of both. Last year, they won the Design of the Year Award from London’s Design Museum for their hot pink teeter-totter on the Mexico/United States border wall.
The duo draws, builds, 3D prints, teach, and write about architecture and design as a cultural endeavor deeply influenced by craft traditions and contemporary technologies. They are the founding partners in the Oakland-based make-tank Emerging Objects. Wired magazine writes of their innovations, “while others busy themselves trying to prove that it’s possible to 3-D print a house, Rael and San Fratello are occupied with trying to design one people would actually want to live in.”
They also speculate about the social agency of design, particularly along the border between the U.S. and Mexico, in their studio RAEL SAN FRATELLO. You can see their drawings, models, and objects in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Design Museum London, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Both Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello earned their master’s degrees in architecture from Columbia University. Rael is currently Associate Professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and San Fratello at San Jose State University. They have additionally taught at Clemson University and Southern California Institute of Architecture. They are past winners of the Metropolis Next Generation Competition, the Sukkah City International Design Competition, and received first place in the Van Alen Institute “Life at the Speed of Rail” competition. In 2013, the firm was the winner of both Design Lab: Next Nest competition sponsored by SITE Santa Fe and P3: People, Prosperity, and the Planet Competition sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The MSJC Art Gallery is currently presenting “She Se Puede,” a special solo exhibition by artist and MSJC associate art instructor Conchi Sanford, through April 21 at its San Jacinto Campus location. The Art Gallery is in Building 1400 on the college’s San Jacinto Campus, 1499 N. State. St. It is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays.
MSJC | Contributed
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