Silas Munro: How Can the Grid Deal with a Messy World?
Joseloff Gallery
March 6 – April 12, 2025
The Georgette and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts is an annual program that brings prominent artists to teach at the Hartford Art School. During his tenure as the 2024-25 Koopman Chair in the Visual Communication Design Department, designer and multidisciplinary artist Silas Munro has taught courses that incorporate his research into BIPOC lineages in the history of graphic design. Munro’s pedagogy relates to his ongoing project, Black Grids, which explores the grid as a foundational—yet under analyzed—design tool.
Munro tests the limitations of the grid through a process that he calls “poetic research.” In video work, printmaking, tapestries, collage, and sculpture, he generates forms that integrate grids with visual references to his identity and familial origins in Uganda. The goal? To create a new, visual language rooted in lineages of Black design. In the site-specific wall drawing Lavender Grid Ku Lwa Bajajjaffe / For the Sake of Our Ancestors, fractal line patterns overlay a photograph of Munro’s grandparents in a celebratory framing of his heritage. Counter to histories in which the grid has been used to organize and control the “other,” here—and throughout Munro’s work—the Black Grid is liberation.
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.
About the Artist
Silas Munro (b. 1981, Fairfax, Virginia) is a designer, artist, writer, researcher, curator, surfer and descendant of the Banyole people of Eastern Uganda. He is the founder of the design studio Polymode, based in Los Angeles and Raleigh, that works with clients across cultural spheres. Commissions and collaborations include: The New York Times Magazine, MIT Press, Nike, Airbnb, the Brooklyn Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago, Dia Art Foundation, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Munro is the curator and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest at Letterform Archive in 2022-2023. He was a contributor to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America and co-authored the first BIPOC-centered design history course, Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design 19th-21st Century. His work was recently exhibited at the Raizes Gallery at Lesley University, the LA Design Festival, and the Scottsdale Museum of Art, and it is included in the collections of Tufts University, Lesley University, and the Montalvo Arts Center.