Mary Banas,
Design Education


An ongoing record of teaching & related activities, 2007–now.



Good Glyphs

April 2020
goodglyphs.com
Project by Calvin Waterman/Violet Office

A dingbat font created by 32 designers. All proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders. GOOD GLYPHS is licensed under SIL Open Font License.

Premise (text from Violet Office): We (Violet Office) are asking for your help to make something that does a little good! As lockdowns have tightened their grip and the global impact is coming into focus, our need to give back has become paramount. We see a unique opportunity to bring a group of amazing designers together to create a fundraising tool that plays into our collective strengths and transcends our physical limitations. Our proposal is GOOD GLYPHS.

GOOD GLYPHS will be a dingbat typeface created from artwork by 36 designers. Historically dingbats have been a way to package and share graphic symbols. We’re hoping to adapt the format to collaboratively create the dingbat font of 2020. We view this as a collection of artwork akin to a digital gallery.

Obviously, we want to create a fucking rad dingbat typeface that activates artworks and pushes positive vibes into the world, but the bigger goal is to use our collective creativity to raise money for people that need our support!
My description: I became interested in the idea of voids and black holes in January 2017. Black holes are a place of ultimate darkness, and they suck energy. They felt like the right symbol for the news cycle back then, and my emotional response to the state of the nation. Lately, I have been thinking of the void more as the “unknown” and how life keeps asking me to be comfortable with not knowing. The most optimistic person I know is my Grandmother. She's 95 years old and also named Mary Banas and right now is in the hospital with the coronavirus. When I was growing up, she would often “see faces” in inanimate objects — like a cloud or a tree. We (my siblings or family and I) would look for the face, sometimes we could see it, other times not. She also had an affinity for the iconic “smiley face” and would stick them on the back of envelopes when she sent me mail. As a young designer, I thought smiley faces were too soft, not intellectual enough. At some point, I realized the smiley is the most important graphic shorthand we have.

Participants:

Scratching the Surface

Listen to Episode 142
December 4, 2019
scratchingthesurface.fm
Host: Jarrett Fuller
From Jarrett:
“On this week’s episode I am joined by the designer and educator Mary Banas. Mary’s independent creative practice called YES IS MORE spans research, teaching and design. She also collaborates with Breanne Trammell, and is on the faculty at the California College of Arts. In this conversation, Mary and I talked about her childhood interest in both art and wanting to be a teacher and then ... teaching design as she does today. We also talked about the value of an expanded practice and moving between disciplines and how to structure critique in the classroom so that it’s helpful for every student. I’ve been a fan of Mary’s and the way she thinks for years now and just had so much fun in this conversation, I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.”


Hole Black Hole Catalog

Summer 2019
Editor: Chris Reeves
From Chris Reeves:

The “Hole Black Hole Catalog” is indebted to Stewart Brand’s “proto- Google” “Whole Earth Catalog,” a sprawling catalog of resources from gardening gloves to nomadic housing published in the 1960s and early 1970s. Brand’s impetus for starting “The Whole Earth Catalog” was the first photograph of Earth, never seen by human eyes until released publicly in the late 1960s. For Brand, the Earth photo presented both a potent symbol of our shared place and a reminder of all the tools we had yet to utilize together. In 2019, a similar “never before seen” photograph from space was released to the world, the first image of a Black Hole. Suffice to say, the world reacted quite differently to this photograph than the counterculture of the 1960s, and it’s this shift in reception that the “Hole Black Hole Catalog” explores. If the initial “Whole Earth Catalog” was meant as "access to tools," the "Hole Black Hole Catalog," offers "access to holes”: holes are everywhere, just sometimes we can’t see them. This catalog attempts to remedy this.

The Hole Black Hole Catalog is edited and produced by Curt Miller and Chris Reeves of Flatland with contributions from Elana Adler, Rohan Ayinde,Team B, BMTMB (Mary Banas and Breanne Trammell), Matt Brett, Kelsey Brod, Alden Burke, Jon Chambers, Chris Collins, Sarabeth Dunton, Tiffany Funk, Isaac Hand, Colleen Keihm, Marlo Koch, Stephanie Koch, Deanna Ledezma, Ruslana Lichtzier, Adrian Lo, Jesse Malmed, Eileen Mueller, Never Angeline NØrth, Joshi Radin, Caitlin Ryan, Nancy Sanchez, Randall Slocum, Laurel Schwulst, John Szczepaniak, Willy Smart, Lauren Sudbrink, and Loraine Wible.



For Freedoms: Art as Political Resistance

September 4th–30, 2018
University of Cincinnati, Reed Gallery


Work made with Breanne Trammell (BMTMB)

For Freedoms 50 State Initiative: For Freedoms is a platform for greater participation in the arts and in civil society. They produce exhibitions, installations, public programs, and billboard campaigns to advocate for inclusive civic participation. Inspired by American artist Norman Rockwell’s paintings of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (1941)—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear— For Freedoms Federation uses art to encourage and deepen public explorations of freedom in the 21st century.

DAAP Galleries at the University of Cincinnati are proud to host the exhibition For Freedoms: Art as Political Resistance in conjunction with the 50-state initiative taking place this fall. Representing a diverse group of voices that speak to shared conflicts and aspirations, these artists seek to provoke thought that can promote understanding and influence the evolving political landscape. The intent of the exhibition is to unify university students, faculty, and recent graduates in the exploration and expression of the power of art to encourage social movement, participation, and facilitate change for the common good. 

Participating Artists: Calista Lyon, Breanne Trammell, Mary Banas, Kari Durham, Ravenna Rutledge, Richard Whitaker, Stephan Slaughter, Charles Woodman, and Kaveh Baghdadchi



Spring 2019

Editor Jaclyn Bruneau

Publisher C the Visual Arts Foundation

Editorial Director Kari Cwynar

Designer Raf Rennie
Abstract:

Mary Banas, surveying the works of Shannon Finnegan, asks the reader to reflect on what otherness means in the context of those who are not readily abled. How can typography be used to enable a viewer to participate in the thoughts and feelings of those with a disability? Finnegans work, utilizing the medium, provides several novel answers to this question.




CONTACT
For speaking engagements, workshops and critic appoinments, drop me a line here.


BIO
Currently teaching at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, MA.

Mary Banas has taught graphic design since 2009, notably as Visiting Assistant Professor in Residence at the University of Connecticut, Rhode Island School of Design, University of Bridgeport, Roger Williams University, and California College of the Arts.

She has led design workshops for the Center for Creative Solutions (Vermont), Dolby Labs (San Francisco), OTIS College of Art and Design (Los Angeles), the Berkeley Art Museum + Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (Michigan). She has been a visiting critic at Maryland Institute College of Art, Pratt Institute, University of Utah, Boston University, Rhode Island School of Design, and San Jose State University.

Mary has been invited to talk about her creative practice at California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA), Cranbrook Academy of Art (Michigan), and University of Georgia (GA). 

Mary develops conceptual and informed designs for brands, institutions, and artists with her independent creative practice YES IS MORE and currently serves as a Senior Visual Designer in Marketing and Communications at Rhode Island School of Design.


Education
Rhode Island School of Design
MFA Graphic Design, with Honors
May 2009

University of Connecticut
BFA Communication Design
May 2003

Original photo: Hunter Kelly. Image manipulation: Derrick Schultz