Saturday November 22, 2025 | 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Location: Residency Unlimited, 360 Court Street (main green church doors), Brooklyn, NY 11231 (map)
The “Dialog by Design” program is a platform for new New Yorkers to design objects and sculptures during a series of hand-crafting workshops led by local RU artists Maya McGlynn and Ross Myren at RU in Carroll Gardens and at the RU House on Governors Island. Participants are asylum seekers mainly from West Africa with little access to resources and guidance necessary to realize their creative ideas. Maya and Ross are deeply involved with migrant communities through their engagement with the non-profit organization EVLovesNYC that strives for food security.
During the workshops, participants explored making as a reflection of experience and identity in New York City. They worked across a range of 2D representation and 3D fabrication techniques, from paper making with materials foraged at the GrowNYC Teaching Garden on Governors Island, to building chairs and lamps with offcuts of reclaimed/sustainably harvested wood donated by Brooklyn-based workshop & millworks, Tri-Lox. The resulting design objects from these workshops (chairs, lamps, drawing) were featured in the concluding exhibition Dialog by Design at RU in December 2025.
The fourth and final workshop for the Dialog by Design program led by Ross and Maya focused on lamp making, engaging the participants on a smaller scale, following the last chair making workshop. The artists first started by deciding whether each person wanted their lamp to be hanging, mounted to the wall, or able to sit on a surface (table or shelf). This decision dictated where the lightbulb would be placed, and how direct/bright the light was going to be for the viewer. A large assortment of items were laid out for use, ranging from scrap wood to metal and recycled plastic- encouraging second and third lives for the materials. Additionally, each person’s design was adapted to utilize what was available—even if some of the items seemed unconventional. Simple connection methods were encouraged to streamline the construction process, and refine each participant’s techniques. Most of the participants used similar methods from the last workshop- connecting, trimming, sanding, and by the end of the day were quite familiar with each tool, and how to build something in an efficient manner.
About
Maya McGlynn is an artist and educator based in NYC with a background in architecture. Her work is focused on understanding the anatomy of organic matter in both its vital and inanimate phases by exploring the conditions and histories from which the materials originate and the visual impact of their formal manifestations. Maya maintains a parallel, yet intimately related, studio practice in drawing and sculpture, examining the overlap between networks of the physical body and the natural world. Systems of ecological interdependence and personal recollection often appear as themes informing her compositions. Working across a range of media she explores how foraged objects and their contextualized structures, both organic and manufactured, can be supported, connected, and re-imagined. In addition, Maya co-founded Scatter Practice (with her partner Ross Myren), an architecture & design/build studio based out of NYC.
Ross Myren is a NYC-based artist and design educator concentrated on addressing social precarity through exploring innovative approaches to resource use, ecological stewardship, and collaborative making. Myren’s work prioritizes what already exists; utilizing reclaimed materials to produce new assemblies that re-assert the value of mundane objects and their embodied histories. Exploring the structural properties of these connections informs his perspective about the built environment that urges a certain architectural restraint; how to do more with less, how to maintain and repair rather than destroy. Through spatial interventions and adaptive operations, Myren blends his desire for deep material understanding with new sensibilities around creative reuse for a planet in crisis.
Ross is one-half of Scatter Practice, a design collaborative founded with Maya McGlynn in 2023, which shares the belief that ones’ relationship to the built environment (and those who inhabit it) is a sensitive one. Through focused research, hand drawing, physical modeling, and experimental fabrication, seemingly disparate or scattered works reveal and question enmeshed networks of material flows, systems of care, and hyper-local conditions to create small-scale projects with the potential for broader social impact.
Scatter Practice Bio
Maya McGlynn and Ross Myren are artists, makers, and educators based in New York City.
Myren and McGlynn both earned Master of Architecture degrees from Parsons School of Design, where they had previously obtained Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Architectural Design.
Together in 2021, they founded their design and fabrication studio Scatter Practice with the shared belief that their relationship to the built environment, and those who inhabit it, is a sensitive one. Since then, Scatter Practice has completed numerous small-scale projects for both institutional and non-profit entities, working across a range of hands-on public workshops and site-specific imaginings of communal spaces.
Currently, Maya and Ross hold part-time faculty positions at Parsons where they lead the undergraduate Design/Build project in collaboration with the NYC DOT; in which their students construct a 40’ long public seating installation outside of The New School’s University Center each year.
Grown further out of their passion for analog making, a significant aspect of their practice includes fabricating models for both institutional and architectural clients; most notably working internationally as the dedicated model-maker for Hauser & Wirth. Scatter Practice has additionally built models for The National Portrait Gallery, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Deste Foundation, The Met, San Francisco MoMA, and more. They have also built models for aanda architects, LEVENBETTS, and Peterson Rich Office.
The 2025 Dialog by Design Residency Program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
