Life of the Mind is the studio of Mark Owens, a designer, writer, and curator working between Austin, Texas and Minneapolis, MN, where he serves as Design Director at the Walker Art Center and leads the Walker’s in-house design studio. In addition to his work with the Walker, he has created publications, websites, identities, exhibition graphics, apparel, and motion design for commercial clients, artists, and institutions including Verso Books, the Whitney Museum of American Art, ICA Miami, LACMA, ICA Philadelphia, The Carnegie Museum of Art, and Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, among others. Mark holds an MFA in graphic design from Yale University and an MA in English from Duke University. His work has been featured in IDEA (Tokyo), GRAPHIC (Korea), Phaidon’s Area 2, the Walker Art Center’s Graphic Design: Now in Production, and included in the 2013 Typojanchi Typography Biennial. His publication designs have been recognized by the AIGA 50 Books 50 Covers competition, and he served as Design Director for the Walker catalogue Sophie Calle: Overshare, designed by Julia Born, which was awarded a 2024 Most Beautiful Swiss Books Award.

His writing on design, music, and material culture has been published widely, appearing in the pages of Dot Dot Dot, Visible Language, IDEA, GRAPHIC, PIN-UP, Bricks from the Kiln, and Experimental Jetset’s Statement and Counter-Statement. He co-edited with Zak Kyes the catalogue for the exhibition Forms of Inquiry at the Architectural Association, London, and has contributed essays to The FACIT Model by Our Polite Society, and artist Shannon Ebner’s Auto Body Collision. He has been the recipient of a Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation and served as guest curator of the exhibition The Surface of Design at Purchase College, SUNY.

Mark is a visiting critic in the MFA program in graphic design at Yale and previously held visiting faculty positions in the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania and at CalArts. He has taught, lectured, led workshops, and curated exhibitions at the Werkplaats Typografie, RISD, Princeton, VCU, UIC, Art Center College of Design, Purchase College SUNY, and Typography Summer School.

library@lifeofthemind.net

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