MFA Year One Exhibition Poster

As an assistant for branding for NYUAD’s MFAin Arts and Media program, Marta Pienkosz took on the challenge of designing promotional materials for the MFA's 2022 exhibition at Warehouse421. The exhibition was to celebrate the first year of work of the inaugural NYUAD Master of Fine Arts cohort.

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Armed with her past design knowledge of logos, Marta began to brainstorm a motif that would combine all the works of the MFA artists in an interesting way. There are five students at the MFA, each working in a very characteristic style in a unique medium – from video, to sound, painting, pyrography, textile, print, and soft sculpture, and they each examine unique themes about the instability of the physical world, such as space, country, gender, and the body.

Marta found that while these were a unique set of mediums and themes, they all reflected the growth of these artists within the MFA program. Her team also looked to botanics and fabrics as inspiration since these materials and subjects came up repeatedly in the artists' work.

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Eventually, she hit upon the idea of using doodles of these materials to fill in a map of the path from NYUAD, the place of development, to Warehouse 421, the place of the artists' future affiliation.

After initial sketching, she created a final drawing with pen on paper, scanned the shape, removed the background, and tweaked the resulting image in Photoshop. While her first choice involved the choice of the color blue, she opted for brown to match the color palette of the artists' photographs.

The final work went on to be used as the main identifier for the exhibition, placed in the cover of the zine and broadcasted in the exhibition's external communications.

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