Saturday May 23, 2026 | 12:00 – 5:00 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. Participants are asylum seekers mainly from West Africa with little access to resources and guidance necessary to realize their creative ideas. From April – June 2026, 4 workshops that focused on design-based exploration of cultural knowledge and heritage took place at RU’s space in Carroll Gardens, resulting in a series of lamps, stools and chairs. These objects will be featured in an exhibition held at RU in December 2026.
The third workshop on May 23, 2026 diverged from the “functional” designs explored in the last two workshops. Instead, this workshop focused on representing themes and images important to each participant in the form of sculpture. Beginning with a drawing/research exercise, this workshop asked participants to consider forms that were culturally significant or important to them. The ensuing sculptures referenced a ceremonial “coming of age” object from Chad, a Guinean football trophy, and Guinean fabric patterns. Each participant discussed why these forms were important to them, and together with Maya and Ross decided what material and connection methods would be best to use when realizing their ideas in the 3D realm. There was hesitance at first with translating something so familiar into a more abstracted version of itself, using wood and metal hardware, but as the workshop progressed participants grew increasingly more confident in their translations.
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.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
