Silas Munro: How Can the Grid Deal with a Messy World?

Joseloff Gallery

March 6 – April 12

Designer and multidisciplinary artist Silas Munro presents the latest iteration of his ongoing project Black Grids with the exhibition, How Can the Grid Deal with a Messy World?, opening March 6 at the Hartford Art School’s Joseloff Gallery.

Munro is the 2024-25 Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts for the Visual Communication Design Department. The Koopman Chair is an annual appointment for visiting teaching artists that rotates through each discipline at the Hartford Art School. During Munro’s tenure, he has taught courses in motion design and user interface design that incorporate his research into African lineages within the history of graphic design.  

This pedagogical approach is informed by Munro’s ongoing project, Black Grids, which explores the grid as a foundational design tool with deep ties to the artist’s Ugandan heritage. In video work, printmaking, tapestries, collage, and sculpture, Munro generates patterns that integrate grids with visual references to his identity and familial origins—all with the goal of creating a new design language rooted in Black liberatory forms.

Munro has used his time at the University to explore connections between his work and that of Sol Lewitt (1928-2007), the Hartford-born conceptual artist celebrated for his large-scale geometric wall drawings. For How Can the Grid Deal with a Messy World?, Munro is creating a site-specific wall drawing that combines fractal line patterns with a photograph of his grandparents to be in conversation with the University of Hartford’s own wall drawing by Sol Lewitt, on permanent display outside the entrance to Joseloff Gallery.

The exhibition will open with a reception at Joseloff Gallery on Thursday, March 6 from 5–7 p.m. An Artist Talk, in which Munro will be in conversation with Bethani Blake, Associate Curator for the African Diaspora at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, will take place at Wilde Auditorium on Wednesday, March 26 at 5 p.m. All programs are free and open to the public.

The exhibition and associated programming are made possible by the Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts fund held by Hartford Art School Endowment, Inc.