Many gameboards on view in the exhibition Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art and Culture offer a glimpse into the social and economic changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As locally-made artifacts and educational tools, they often reflect, if not reinforce, the values and priorities of modern America.
Using the Wendel Gameboard Collection as a reference, game scholar and designer Mary Flanagan (Critical Play: Radical Game Design, 2009, MIT; Playing Oppression. The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games, 2023, MIT) will discuss her historical research about game rules, design, role-playing and community building. Followed by a conversation with Naomi Clarck, Chair of the NYU Game Center, her presentation will highlight the cultural and political significance of board games such as the Game of the Goose, Monopoly, Chess and Parcheesi while shedding a new light on play, and the game industry.
About the speakers
Mary Flanagan has a research-based, transdisciplinary practice informed by her methodology “critical play.” She investigates and exploits the seams between technology, play, and human experience to make the unseen perceptible. Interested in the ways technologies can adopt or represent hidden biases, Flanagan uncovers the underpinnings of technological systems to make them apparent. Her approach involves both onscreen space as well as physical spaces, objects, and actions. She sees the computer as a collaborator and pursues collisions with aleatory events, chance operations and glitched code.
Flanagan has exhibited internationally at venues such as The Guggenheim New York, Tate Britain, Museu de Arte, Arquitectura e Tecnologia Lisbon, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, The Baltimore Museum of Art, NeMe Arts Center, Cyprus, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Spain, Museum of Fine Arts Cologne, and the Whitney Biennial of American Art.
Her work is featured in public and private collections, including The Whitney Museum and ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Germany and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Flanagan won the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica in the Interactive art+ for her work [help me know the truth] and is the recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship, the Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and has been awarded residencies with the Brown Foundation, MacDowell, Bogliasco, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
Flanagan has lectured widely including at Oxford, Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, and the Sorbonne. She was a John Paul Getty Museum Scholar, a Senior Scholar in Residence at the Cornell Society for the Humanities, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto and received an Honoris Causa in Design, Illinois Institute of Technology. Her work has been supported by commissions and grants including The British Arts Council, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Flanagan has been invited as a cultural leader at the World Economic Forum at Davos. She is also the Fairchild Distinguished Professor of Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and lives and works in Hanover, NH and the city of Houston, TX.
Naomi Clark is a game designer, teacher, and scholar who has been making games since 1999. In that time, she’s contributed to over three dozen titles in varied roles, including game designer, writer, and producer, as well as occasionally contributing to code and graphic design. Naomi’s experience ranges from games for well-known companies such as LEGO and Atari to casual and mobile games for mass audiences, along with smaller-scale independent and experimental work.
Besides her industry experience, Naomi is also a games scholar and critic. She co-authored A Game Design Vocabulary, a textbook that provides a conceptual framework for game analysis and creation, and contributed to collections including Queer Game Studies, Videogames for Humans, and Honey and Hot Wax. She has given numerous talks at game conferences and festivals such as the Game Developers Conference, A MAZE, Indiecade, Games for Change and DiGRA.
Prior to her appointment as a NYU faculty member in 2016, Naomi served as an adjunct professor at Parsons: the New School for Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the New York Film Academy in addition to NYU. She served as one of the first advisors for the NYU Game Center’s incubator and developed early courses for the department’s graduate and undergraduate curriculum. For the NYU Game Center’s No Quarter exhibition, she created Consentacle, a two-player card game that explores complex themes of sexuality and consent. Her current work spans cooperative strategy games and roleplaying. Outside of games, Naomi was also a founding member of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project collective, and a drummer for several bands in Brooklyn’s Queer Country music scene.
Images:
Left: Nine Men’s Morris Board, early 20th century, carved and stained wood with wood frame, 14 x 14 in. American Folk Art Museum, Gift of Doranna and Bruce Wendel; right: Shoot Out, early 20th century, paint on wood, iron, 26 1/2 x 17 in. Collection of Doranna and Bruce Wendel.
Credits
This program is presented in partnership with the NYU Game Center.
Registration
Space is limited; advance registration is required. Please consider making a donation when you register to support ongoing virtual programming.
Instructions for joining with a Zoom link and password will be provided by email upon registration confirmation under “Additional Information.” Closed captioning will be provided in English. For questions or to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@folkartmuseum.org.