Saturday May 23, 2026 | 12:00 – 5:00 PM
Location: Residency Unlimited, 360 Court Street (main green church doors), Brooklyn, NY 11231 (map)
Launched in September 2025, “Dialog by Design” is a hand-crafting series of workshops for New New Yorkers led by local RU artists Maya McGlynn and Ross Myren to design objects and sculptures. In each five-hour workshop, McGlynn and Myren thoughtfully mentor small groups—primarily West African New New Yorkers—with little access to resources and guidance necessary to realize their creative ideas. Their mentoring process is shaped by shared inquiry, experimentation and dialogue. Dialog by Design’s tremendous value lies in offering participants a space to step outside their daily routines and activate their creative selves. Working alongside McGlynn and Myren, participants will be encouraged to develop their concepts and execute designs through iteration, abstraction, and problem-solving.
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 seventh 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 Master of Architecture degree from Parsons School of Design. Her artistic practice 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. Together with Ross Myren, Maya is a co-founder of Scatter Practice, an architecture & design/build studio based out of NYC. Maya also holds a part-time faculty position at Parsons where she co-leads the undergraduate Design/Build project in collaboration with the NYC DOT (whereby students construct a 40’ long public seating installation outside of The New School’s University Center each year).
Ross Myren is a NYC-based artist and design educator with a Master of Architecture degree from Parsons School of Design. His artistic practice is 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. Together with Maya McGlynn, Ross is a co-founder of Scatter Practice, an architecture & design/build studio based out of NYC. He holds a part-time faculty position at Parsons where he leads the undergraduate Design/Build project in collaboration with the NYC DOT (whereby students construct a 40’ long public seating installation outside of The New School’s University Center each year).
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
