C: Andrew Blauvelt
Andrew Blauvelt is a designer, curator, writer, and educator. Since 2015, he is Director of the Cranbrook Art Museum in metropolitan Detroit. For 17 years, he held a number of positions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, including Design Director, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, and Chief of Communications and Audience Engagement. At the Walker, he served as creative director of its progressive design identity and developed its award-winning publishing program, both in print and online. In 2009, under his leadership, the Walker received the National Design Award for Corporate and Institutional Achievement, the first non-profit to receive the honor.
Prior to the Walker, Blauvelt led the graphic design program at NC State University in Raleigh, where he helped develop its graduate program that explored design as a cultural and cognitive artifact, connecting ideas from the humanities and social sciences to the practice of design. During this period, he was also a tutor at the Jan van Eyck Academy, a post-graduate research center in the Netherlands, and served as interim head of the 2D Design program at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he received his MFA in Design.
Blauvelt combines the roles of curator, author, editor, art director, and exhibition designer through major museum exhibitions and their accompanying publications, including: Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics (2018); Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (2015); and Graphic Design: Now in Production (2011). He organized and edited the publication, Parallel Cities: The Multilevel Metropolis (DAP, 2016), which traces a transhistorical and multicultural history of the elevated pedestrian network in urban spaces.
He has written numerous essays about design history, theory, pedagogy, and criticism. His work has been exhibited and published extensively in North America, Europe, and Asia.