Lecture: Paola Antonelli

I am so happy that I went to the Paola Antonelli lecture. After a long day of portfolio review and transporting work to and from school, I was tempted to just go home. However, I forced myself to attend the lecture and I loved it.

Paola Antonelli is an incredibly smart and interesting speaker. Her lecture was informative, entertaining, and inspiring. She began her lecture by giving a brief background describing how she came to her job as senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA. After majoring in economics for two years and discovering that it was not for her, Antonelli studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. She worked as an architect for a couple of years, before abandoning it for writing. Anotonelli then moved to Los Angeles and taught at UCLA until she applied for and received her position at MoMA. Of all of this career-shifting, she simply says "The path found itself."

Antonelli has found design to be her true passion, and her mission as a curator is to ensure that design is recognized as part of natural human creativity. At MoMA, she strives to make her exhibitions "sexy" to keep the audience captivated - most visitors to MoMA are not there for design, and Antonelli seeks to change that.

During the lecture, she showed images from several of her past exhibitions that were amazing. I'm posting one of my favorite images below, from the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition, which combined art and science, resulting in amazing and beautiful work. You can learn more about Paola Antonelli here, and visit the MoMA website here.