Building Blocks: Designers Shaped by the Art Students League

Andrew Gardner is a writer and curator based in New York. His work focuses on a wide range of topics that grapple with the socio-political dimensions of the human-made world and where art, design, craft, technology, and the natural world converge with global histories. He has organized or contributed to exhibitions for major institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Cooper Hewitt, and Bard Graduate Center, and has published widely, including contributing to exhibition catalogs for the MoMA, Cranbrook Museum of Art, Le Stanze Del Vetro, and Odunpazari Modern Museum (OMM). He has also commissioned large scale public art for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in New York.

Steffi Ibis Duarte is a curator, design historian, and staff member at Manitoga/the Russel Wright Design Center in Upstate New York. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London and has worked for curatorial departments at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, and the American Folk Art Museum.

Bridget Bartal is an emerging curator and design historian. She is the inaugural MillerKnoll Curatorial Fellow at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Her upcoming project is an exhibition and publication titled Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the US, opening in summer of 2025.  In 2022, Bartal received her MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Currently, she serves on the Publication Committee of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.