About Rowena
Rowena Reed Kostellow taught design for half a century. She was an immensely influential teacher who spent her life developing and refining a methodology for teaching what she called the “Structure of Visual Relationships” underlying all art and design. The principles of study that she helped formulate were embodied in a foundation curriculum that became the basic, universal first year of study for all Pratt Institute art and design students. Foundation studies, strongly influenced by the Pratt curriculum, were adopted in schools of art and design throughout the country. In many schools, as at Pratt, they are still the bedrock upon which advanced, specialized studies in the arts are built.
Rowena Reed had the unshakable conviction that foundation studies aimed at exploring abstract visual relationships are essential to creating and appreciating art and design. She focused her own attention and considerable gifts on exploring these relationships in the three-dimensional realm.
“Rowena was very clear about the difference between 2-D and 3-D,” explains William Fasolino, who directs Pratt’s Foundation Program. “Three-dimensional objects are all around us, but we don’t understand three dimensions. You need different muscles to push and pull and make something that’s three-dimensional. Rowena’s courses had that kind of flesh and blood. We’ve lost that.”
In l982, Reed was awarded an NEA grant to write a book on her structured approach to the study of visual relationships. She planned to document her methodology by defining and illustrating the vocabulary and carefully sequenced exercises at its heart. She did not live long enough to carry out her project. Shortly after her death, a group of former students and colleagues created the Rowena Reed Kostellow Fund to provide a source of support for the advancement of education in three-dimensional design and visual communications. One means for accomplishing this goal was to ensure that Reed’s book become a reality.
Although she did not leave a detailed written record of her principles and methods, she did spend a lifetime talking about and demonstrating them, inside and outside the classroom, to students, colleagues, practicing professionals, and friends. Rowena Reed Kostellow: The Structure of Visual Relationships documents her methodology by reconstructing her ongoing conversation from the recollections and notes of those who taught and studied with her, and from audio and visual tapes made in the last decade of her life.
The book includes a description of all the three-dimensional foundation experiences that she taught in the last thirty years of her career, plus some advanced three-dimensional exercises and her signature exercises in space analysis. Wherever possible, the book is illustrated with slides of work done by Rowena’s students in classes taught by her. Where such slides were not available, exercises are illustrated with slides from classes taught by her colleagues and former students.
It is impossible to reproduce the experience of being and working in her classroom. The essence of Rowena Reed’s teaching was the experience itself. In fact, she called the exercises in her courses “experiences” because they led students to insight through intense, in-the-moment concentration, discovery, and revelation. They were powerful, personal epiphanies that finally defy description.
— Gail Greet Hannah
