This talk is the result of many years of working in an art and design educational environment and observing the relationship between these disciplines, their intrinsic and implicit values, and how their significance has been conflating, overlapping, colliding, and reemerging in the last decade in particular around the shared interest in sustainability. It will traverse a complex ground starting with images as innocent as those of the impressionists, working through the benign controversies such work produced, to the unique achievement of Maya Lins Vietnam Memorial and the more recent examples of art and design responses to the Iraq war. The examples will move between art, architecture, memorials, monuments, and interventions to comment upon the importance of making these implicit values explicit for the next generation of practitioners who need to know how to understand the way in which art and design have been and will continue to be forces for social change, leading the conversation about the urgencies of the planet and our relationship to these concerns for the future.

Becker recently assumed the role of Dean of Faculty at the School of the Arts, Columbia University in New York, having from 1994 to 2007served as Dean of Faculty, Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This event is free and open to the public.