“Rebeca has won the three most significant awards in the field of design: The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Communication Design, 2012, the AIGA Medal in 2017, and induction to the One Club Hall of Fame in 2017. This triple crown would be worthy enough on its own, more than worthy, absolutely exceptional, but when you add in that Rebeca is the first and only Latina to win each one of these, much less all three, the achievement is towering.” — Peter Lunenfeld, 2018.
SHORT BIO
Rebeca Méndez is a highly influential designer and artist who has achieved excellence and distinction in both fields. She has an international reputation as a leading voice in the production of socially-grounded, aesthetically rigorous design, innovative media-inflected arts, and monumental permanent public art. Her current research and practice examine reciprocal relationships and environmental justice in a multi-species world in the midst of climate change, mass extinction, and a ravaging extractivist society. Her fieldwork has taken her to vulnerable environments and communities in the arctic and to threatened ecologies in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Méndez’s diverse works are driven by her interest in perception and embodied experience and they develop within science, design and art, and manifest as immersive installations of video and sound, photography, book arts, and public art. Bridging scientific and indigenous perspectives, Méndez has collaborated with significant science institutions and with Acjachemen, Tongva, Ohlone, and Zapotec communities. Méndez has received significant recognition including her recent inclusion into the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the 2017 Medal of AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts); induction into the One Club Hall of Fame, New York, 2017; and the 2012 National Design Award in Communication Design, bestowed by The White House and the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Her work has been published widely, including in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Forbes, Flaunt, Telemundo and NBC News. PBS NewsHour’s Art and Culture Series CANVAS showcased Mendez’s January 8th Memorial artwork honoring the victims and survivors of the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Méndez’s work is represented in public and private collections and has been exhibited widely including a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Other venues include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, and at the 55th Venice Biennial. Méndez is a leading academic and industry voice, regularly speaking to audiences across the globe. She is founder of Rebeca Méndez Studio, an award-winning independent design and art studio in Los Angeles. She earned a BFA, a MFA, and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Art Center College of Design. Méndez is a tenured professor and chair in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA and is founder and director of the Counterforce Lab, a research studio that harnesses the power of art and design to engage with the reality of the global ecological crisis and its ties to environmental injustice.
NETWORK
Vimeo
INITIATIVES / RESEARCH
Counterforce Lab