MME: The Class
The Multi Media Event I & II courses, offered in the Fiber Department at Maryland Institute College of Art, offer a year-long experience focused on experimental fashion and collaborative exchange. Students who enroll in this class enter it from a place as makers but are soon tasked with the larger concerns of creative direction as related to fashion: styling, photography, communication, graphic identity, naming, atmosphere, etc. When the fall semester of 2020 began, the group committed to going through this process regardless of its remote form. The weekly check-ins created a community that showed up for itself repeatedly. When the pandemic started, no one thought it would go on for as long as it did, but yet, as artists know, sticking together for support is a way to keep going. The experience, while not the same in this class, didn’t lose the collaborative outcome. The quiet breakthroughs, and realizations still came—a series of small, but significant graduations almost cumulatively more important than finishing the big, public way. This group has my respect for being able to recognize this in particular.
The branding system of this project, realized in collaboration with senior graphic designers Hannah Ahn and María Sánchez, has a tactility to it that has been shaped by today’s circumstances. Perhaps it was a response to the virtual boxes we all found ourselves in for longer than desired, unable to share common physical space, that created a book and branding system that returns touch, experience, choice and control to a viewer. The students realized early on that the branding system would be the only place where their artworks could make contact, which projected a kind of optimism. When you are a maker, you are never alone and when you plan for the future with imagination, especially with others, the good stuff is still possible, in fact, very possible.
Thank you MME class of 2021,
for your possibilitarianism.
