2025/26 Public Seminar Series: Kelly Walters
What does the future of design look like?
What does it mean to design within a lineage of resistance, reproduction, and radical imagination? This talk explores the ways in which contemporary graphic design practice can intersect with traditional print processes, while drawing deeply from research into the history of Black print culture in the United States. Through close examinations of typography, archival materials, and reflections on her studio practice, Kelly Walters will highlight how print becomes both a political tool and a site of cultural memory, shaping Black visual language across generations.
Kelly Walters is an interdisciplinary designer and research scholar whose work engages with histories of Black American print publishing, material culture and archival practice. She explores these themes in her studio practice Bright Polka Dot , and looks closely at the evolution of typography in Black print culture. Kelly has curated a number of exhibitions, including Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.: Citizen Printer (San Francisco, CA), Kindred (Providence, RI), Open Dialogue: Artists + Designers of Afro-Caribbean Descent (London, England) and Remix: Activating the Archive (London, England). In 2021, she received a Graham Foundation award for her exhibition With a Cast of Colored Stars (New York, NY). Kelly has written extensively about the impact of colonization on Black American print design histories and her notable publications include Black, Brown + Latinx Design Educators: Conversations on Design (2021) and Race and the co-edited anthology The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection (2022). Kelly Walters is currently an Associate Professor of Communication Design and Director of the BFA Communication Design program in Parsons School of Design at The New School.
The UIC School of Design public seminar series serves as a research platform for the school's MDes program, stimulating broad intellectual inquiry about the values guiding the designer by promoting discourse across industrial and graphic design.
Kelly Walters
Thursday, March 12, 6:30P
Room 1100
Architecture + Design Studios
845 West Harrison Street, Chicago
Free and open to the public.