Here is a place without categories or hierarchies for projects which began as thoughts, sometimes actions—work that eventually might become objects or notations. I write not done to be read but to catch improvised, fleeting and somehow important paths for me to explore and expose. Here I am not the designer, professor of design, photographer, artist, DesignInquirer, Mainer by way of North Dakota and Arizona, partner, mother, all the rest… but I offer the sum, piece or part of my looking and making in this thought sketching space. And I confess I overuse commas, probably as an attempt to slow us all down.
2018 BIO & CONTACT
In her decades-spanning photography practice, Margo Halverson has been fascinated with making images that capture peripheral moments that refer to home and times’ obsolescence. She is internationally renown for teaching the creative process and for giving meaning form with words and image—which, in a photography book workshop in the eighties she was told, ‘that’s called graphic design’.
She is creative director and partner of Alice Design, (alicedesign.com) 1983–present; cofounder of the vanguard educational non-profit organization, DesignInquiry (designinquiry.net) 2002–present, whose mission is to cultivate the collective goal of extra-disciplinary discourse, productive counter-production, and research of design; and Professor of graphic design at Maine College of Art, 1990–present. Margo earned her BFA and MFA in Photography from Arizona State University in early eighties when the tenor was New Topographics. Since abandoning her 4×5 camera for the iphone, she photographs unceasingly, all the while designing in collaboration with inspired artists and museums, helping other creative professionals establish a visual voice, teaching, and calling the dog in. She is a native of Forest River, North Dakota and by way of the southwest, Margo made teaching in Portland, Maine, a way of life while raising a family, happily skipping the beach in summer, and most recently since the kids are in college, learning to fence.
CONTACT margo.halverson[at]gmail[dot]com
photo by Charles B. Melcher @ 2017, Portland, Maine