December 1st, 2014
5:30 PM (event will begin at 5:45 PM)
Cleveland Institute of Art – Russell B. Aitken Auditorium
11141 East Boulevard Cleveland Ohio

Join AIGA Cleveland, the Consulate of Italy in Detroit, AIA, the Cleveland Institute of Art and Kent State University – Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative for an evening celebrating the lives and work of Massimo and Lella Vignelli. Panelists include R. Roger Remington, Vignelli Distinguished Professor of Design, RIT; Dr. Renato Miracco, Cultural Attache, Embassy of Italy in Washington, D.C.; and Steven Litt, Moderator, Art and Architecture Critic, The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Cleveland.com. RSVPs are needed by November 24, 2014, and can be sent to maryhelen@aiacleveland.com. There is no cost for attendance at this event.

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Renato Miracco

Renato Miracco, author of books, catalogues and articles on a variety of cultural subjects, has curated more than 100 exhibitions. He has curated for London’s Estorick Collection, New York’s Metropolitan Museum’s Giorgio Morandi show, and in 2005 he has been guest curator for Modern Italian Art at Tate Modern, London. He has directed New York’s Italian Cultural Institute for two years, he is a counselor for the Scientific Committee of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies since 2006, and since 2010 he is the Cultural Attaché for the Italian Embassy in Washington DC. Supervising curator of all of the Embassy’s exhibits in Washington and around the country, he has been head curator and branding supervisor for the 2013 year of Italian culture in US, during which he has organized more than 300 events, and for Italy@150, for which he has created a calendar of events known as “Italian Treasures in the U.S.”, organized in partnership with more than 80 museums around the country. Instrumental in negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Archaeology between the governments of Italy and the United States, he has received the Green Card for Exceptional Ability from President Obama.

R. Roger Remington

R. Roger Remington has spent his formative and adult life in upstate New York (the Adirondacks and Rochester). His professional education in graphic design was in non-establishment settings, having studied graphic design at Rochester Institute of Technology and art history and printmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In September, 2013 he began his 50th year on the faculty at RIT. He considers himself primarily a teacher who has critical interests in design studies (graphic design history, theory and methods), research, writing and graphic design practice. His teaching quality was acknowledged with receipt of the Eisenhart Annual Award for Outstanding Teaching, RIT’s highest recognition of teaching excellence. He is RIT’s Massimo and Lella Vignelli Distinguished Professor of Design, the first endowed chair in the School of Design. Over the years he has maintained a professional practice in graphic design with several partners.

For the past 30 years at RIT, he has developed a unique scholarly resource, the Graphic Design Archive. This project involves preserving and interpreting the original source materials of 35 Modernist design pioneers such as Lester Beall, Will Burtin, Cipe Pineles, William Golden and Alvin Lustig among many others.

Since 1982 he has been seriously engaged in the research, interpretation and preservation of the history of graphic design. He has co-chaired two major symposia on graphic design history and written Nine Pioneers in American Graphic Design, for The MIT Press. His second book, Lester Beall: Trailblazer of American Graphic Design was published in July of 1996 by W.W. Norton. American Modernism Graphic Design 1920-1960, was published in 2003 for Laurence King Publishers in London. It is distributed in the United States by Yale University Press and is in its second edition in 2013. His new book Design and Science-The Life and Work of Will Burtin was published by Lund Humpries in Fall, 2007. Presently he is working on a book titled The Collective Writings of Will Burtin.

He has initiated and developed numerous graphic design history courses at RIT. In 1999 he offered a new design history course on 20th Century Information Design which was targeted at on-line learners. More recently he has taught a course on Women Pioneers in Graphic Design and, in cooperation with the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House, a new course on Graphic Design in Film. In 2012 he initiated a new graduate course, Design History Colloquium, in which the students utilize RIT’s design archives to research and create an in-depth case study.

In Fall 2008, he was a laureate for induction into the Hall of Fame of the New York Art Directors Club and in 2009, at RIT, he was honored with the Gitner Family Award for Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Communications. In 2013 he was selected to join AGI, the Alliance Graphique International, graphic design’s most prestigious organization. In 2014 he was the first recipient of the RIT Trustees Lifetime Achievement Award for Scholarship in Graphic Design.

A major career accomplishment has been the realization of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at RIT in 2010. This facility houses the archive of Massimo and Lella Vignelli and is the centerpiece of bringing design excellence to innovative educational programming at RIT.