The University of Minnesota’s College of Design is pleased to announce that fashion designer and urban gardening advocate Ron Finley will be the featured speaker for this year’s Kusske Lecture & Dialogue on Thursday, December 1.
Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Ron showed an early passion and talent for fashion, and started his innovative clothing company, The DROPDEAD. Collexion, in his family garage. The line was a top seller with high-end retailers such as Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue and attracted the attention of many celebrities.
Finley is now widely known as the “Gangsta Gardener.” Frustrated by his community’s lack of access to fresh, organic food, and local policymakers’ resistance to alternative approaches, he inadvertently started a “Horti-Cultural” revolution when he turned the barren parkway in front of his home into an edible oasis in 2010. This led to the creation of the Ron Finley Project, which focuses on teaching communities how to transform food deserts into food sanctuaries and encouraging people to see their land as a regenerative resource. “Beauty In, Beauty Out.”
The Kusske Lecture & Dialogue Series brings renowned design practitioners and thought leaders to the College of Design to consider humanity’s most pressing issues and advance dialogues across disciplines, aiming to generate solutions for a radically changing world. Finley will discuss how he started gardening and the mission of The Ron Finley Project. In conversation with College of Design faculty, he will discuss how his creative background became an asset for his evolving activism.
Following the keynote, Finley will participate in a discussion with KDI Co-Principals Linsey Griffin (Assistant Professor of Apparel Design and Co-Director of the Human Dimensioning Lab) and Carlye Lauff (Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director, Product Design), and Design Justice Director Terresa Moses (Assistant Professor of Graphic Design). An audience Q&A will follow.
The Kusske Lecture & Dialogue Series is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
About the Kusske Design Initiative
A generous commitment from Manitou Fund to the University of Minnesota’s College of Design honors the memory of distinguished alumnus Christopher Arthur Kusske (BLA ’78). The Kusske Design Initiative (KDI) honors his legacy through widely inclusive events and collaborations among a growing community of broadminded designers. Chris’s emphases on interdisciplinary dialogue, co-creativity, and celebration of the natural world inspire solutions for planetary-scale issues. By combining values of ecological stewardship with the disciplinary spectrum that forms the college’s DNA, KDI programs and inquiries have transformative potential for the products we use and the environments we inhabit.
About Ron Finley
Most widely known as the “Gangsta Gardener”, Ron Finley inadvertently started a “Horti-Cultural” revolution when he transformed the barren parkway in front of his South Central L.A. home into an edible oasis. Ron unexpectedly became one of L.A.’s most widely known artivists. Frustrated by his community’s lack of access to fresh, organic food, Finley started a revolution when he turned the parkway in front of his home into an edible garden in 2010. Ron’s goal was simple; bring healthy food to an area where there was none, making him see first hand how gardens build community and change people’s lives. This experience blossomed into a quest to change how we eat and to teach youth that they have the capacity to design the life they want to live, not the one that’s been designed for them.
The University of Minnesota’s College of Design is pleased to announce that internationally acclaimed architect, Frank Owen Gehry, CC, FAIA, will be the inaugural speaker for the new Kusske Lecture & Dialogue Series on Tuesday, November 16.
A generous commitment from Manitou Fund to the University of Minnesota’s College of Design will honor the memory of distinguished alumnus Christopher Arthur Kusske (BLA ‘78).
As the summer winds down so does the typical growing season for Minnesotan gardeners and growers. But not for the five Deep Winter Greenhouses designed by Center for Sustainable Building Research (CSBR) Research Fellow Daniel Handeen.
