NewsFile | 3D Facial Reconstruction, Women Designers on the Rise + more!

Welcome to NewsFile, our round-up of newsy tidbits and happenings from the world of contemporary ceramic art and contemporary ceramics. In this edition we begin with women designers challenging a field dominated by men.

Women Designers on the Rise

Toronto’s 2018 design exhibition Capacity, first established in 2011, highlighted Canada’s rising female designers in an attempt to challenge inequality in the industry, reports Dezeen.

The annual exhibition featured designs solely by Canadian women during the Toronto Offsite Design Festival (TODO) in January. When the show first launched eight years ago, it was among the first to celebrate women in the design industry.

Among those exhibited were ceramic designers Alissa Coe (our featured image) and Talia Silva.

You can read the rest of Dezeen’s list of women to watch out for here.

Art+ Forensics Fusion

Graduate students at the New York Academy of Art fused art and science in an effort to offer closure to the families of and dignity to the eight unidentified migrants who lost their lives during a trek across the US-Mexico border. Using facial reconstruction technology, the students 3D printed replicas of the men’s skulls with clay, The New York Times writes.

The class, taught by Joe Mullins, a forensic artist with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, focuses on reconstructing the faces of migrants who lost their lives in the desert. The workshop reflects the growing sophistication of the field of forensic facial reconstruction — a fusion of science, art and anthropology in which the skull is used to build a face and to help investigators identify the dead. It is particularly helpful in cases of crime or mass disasters.

Read the entire NYT article here.

Pritzker Prize honors

The LA Times reports the Pritzker Prize jury announced in early March that its laureate for 2018 is 90-year-old Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi.

Thanks to his collaborations early in his career with Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, Doshi, the first Indian architect to win the Pritzker, is a figure who shows up regularly in histories of modernist architecture and its relationship with India and other Asian countries. He won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, another top honor, in 1995, and was a member of the Pritzker jury from 2005 to 2007. He has taught at American universities including MIT, Rice and the University of Pennsylvania.

Read the rest of the article here + check out Pritzker Prize’s selected Doshi works, citations and images here.

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