|
Credit: Courtesy of Mason Gross
Middlesex County Court Judge Amy Piro
Chambers, left, and recent Mason Gross
School of the Arts graduate Efeme
Onaodowan pose by the constitutional law
exhibit as it is being installed.
Onaodowan took part in a Mason Gross
visual arts project to redesign the
arbitration room of the Middlesex County
Courthouse and create a hallway exhibit
to commemorate the New Jersey
Constitutional Convention of 1947.
|
In the spring semester of 2005, 15 undergraduate design students at the Mason Gross School of the Arts received a unique assignment: to redesign the arbitration room of the Middlesex County Courthouse and create a hallway exhibit to commemorate the New Jersey Constitutional Convention of 1947.
The undertaking came to life late last year, when Judge Amy Piro Chambers and Judge Deborah Venezia proposed the commission to the Rutgers art school. Chambers said she had reached out to Mason Gross because “here was a resource in the community, people who could really help us, and they were our neighbors.”
Jacqueline Thaw and Gerry Beegan, assistant professors in the department of visual arts, supervised the project, incorporating it into their spring classes. Both were delighted with the idea. From the school’s perspective the assignment was ideal. “It gave students the opportunity to experience how collaboration with a client can be creative and productive,” Thaw said.
Two student design teams were formed – one for the arbitration room and one for the Constitution project. The arbitration room team quickly realized that to truly make an impact, they would need to dig deeper into the room’s presence as a whole. “The first task was to get a sense of how the room functioned. There was a stuttered flow to the room, making it unclear where people should go,” says Dave Cicirelli, then student manager of the project and now a graphic designer in New York City.
Given the very nature of arbitration, its give-and-take, inherent tension and ultimate goal of compromise, the team conceived a holistic approach. “They [the students] looked for colors and themes that would alleviate the apprehension people felt coming into the room,” Chambers says. The team repainted the drab walls a deep blue, and chose new furniture and a seating arrangement more conducive to dialogue. The team also commissioned a series of seven photographs – shot by a Mason Gross student – to be hung on two walls.
For the Constitutional Convention project, the students were required to represent the historic rewriting of the New Jersey Constitution in 1947 with text and images, focusing on the historical events and the basic individual rights established at the convention – which, fittingly, was held at what was then the Rutgers auditorium.
“A major challenge was to cohesively present these two very different pieces of information,” adds Efeme Onaodowan, who graduated last year from the Mason Gross School and is now a junior designer at a firm in New York City. The team created eye-catching panels that highlighted individual rights – anti-segregation, equal rights for women, free speech and the right to low-income housing – which interlock with historical photographs and text. Onaodowan said, “Each panel was created to be the same height, have similar color palettes and typographic treatments as a way of unifying the two elements.” Many lawyers and other courthouse visitors have told Chambers they find the hallway exhibit a welcome addition – both for its content and for its visual appeal.
The collaborative nature of the projects – among the Mason Gross students and faculty, and with courthouse personnel – proved integral to the experience. Students had real-world issues to address and found great benefit in the process. “Working with a team, having real clients, dealing with vendors and commissioning other artists presented a perfect learning opportunity,” says Graziela Meza, a student member of the arbitration room team now working on a master’s degree in graphic communications management and technology at New York University.
Completed in early June of 2005, the students’ work has already had a noticeable impact. Arbitration room workers have found the new environment warm and welcoming. One lawyer told Chambers that the design had a calming effect on her when she entered the room. “People were just so excited that something like that had been done,” Chambers says.
Thaw, whose design work includes projects for cultural, educational and nonprofit organizations, sees the students’ work in a broader context. “Design can inform, explain, amuse, celebrate and create an experience,” she says. The courthouse projects served as a great model for our students of design’s impact on others.”
|
