Prem Krishnamurthy
"Department of Transformation"

How can art be transformative—for individuals, groups, and society? Prem Krishnamurthy explores these and other questions by sharing recent projects across design, writing, and experimental pedagogy. Taking each project as a rehearsal for the next—and as a way to explore different scales of transformation—his approach prototypes forms of connection and collaboration embedded within contemporary artistic practice. Using writing, music, movement, and conversation (+ karaoke!), this participatory event opens up polyvocal ways of working in and on the world.

About Prem Krishnamurthy

Prem Krishnamurthy (b. 1977) is a designer, author, and educator. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. His professional papers were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2019. In 2022, Domain Books published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters, which was named one of Fast Company’s “Best Design Books of 2022”. Prem graduated with a B.A. in Fine Art from Yale College in 1999 and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany the same year.

He currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design studio, and organizes Department of Transformation, an itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. In addition to leading design projects with artists, cultural institutions, and nonprofit organizations across the world, he has curated several large-scale exhibitions. These include Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, the 2022 edition of FRONT International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Our Silver City, 2094 at Nottingham Contemporary; and Ministry of Graphic Design in Sharjah, UAE. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York. 

Critical Conversations Partnerships:

Critical Conversations provides a space for artists and cultural producers that is rooted in exchange and inquiry. Organizing partners facilitate a year-round calendar of studio visits for Oregon artists by prominent visiting curators and arts writers, who also offer public lectures and other forms of engagement to our community. Recognizing the nexus between artists and those who reflect upon and present their work, Critical Conversations also sponsors a series of convenings, commissioned writing, and an annual publication that specifically engage Oregon’s curators and arts writers around currents in society and the field. 

Critical Conversations is a collaboration between The Ford Family Foundation and University of Oregon's Center for Art Research in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College.