Saturday October 11, 2025 | 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM
Location: RU House at Colonels Row, Building #404B on Governors Island (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.
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 first workshop on October 11, 2025 centered the idea of representing one’s story through drawing. This was the participants first time drawing. They were asked to represent physical places, patterns, and other subject matter that they feel is a part of their identity, something that has stayed significant to them throughout their journey to NYC. The workshop began with a presentation of iconic artists that have worked with this subject matter, emphasizing the importance of color, composition, and text, as well as a variety of methods. Some common images represented amongst participants were physical places of joy from their home country, patterns significant to their culture, as well as attempts at drawing themselves and animals they found significant.
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).
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.
