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Did you miss our PRINT Book Club with Elizabeth Resnick? Register here to watch the recording and buy your copy of Women Graphic Designers: Rebalancing the Canon.
Elizabeth Resnick, a designer, educator, curator, and archivist, joined the PRINT Book Club in November to discuss her new book, Women Graphic Designers: Rebalancing the Canon. The book brings long-overlooked women designers into the historical record. Trained at RISD, she went on to launch her own studio, then joined the faculty of Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and later became chair of the graphic design department there. Resnick has spent her career connecting design practice, pedagogy, and social responsibility. Her curatorial work on international exhibitions about peace, AIDS awareness, gender-based violence, and digital activism underscores her belief that graphic design is a civic force, not just a visual one.
Her new book threads together the lives of 42 women whose stories were scattered, obscured, or forgotten, stories of courage, ingenuity, migration, modernism, and sheer creative force. Written by contributors rooted in those contexts, the essays surface “hidden histories” of women whose work was influential locally but never canonized. Resnick is candid about having once taught only the usual (male, Western) names, and she now treats this project as both correction and expansion—an effort to redefine the canon by widening who gets remembered, rather than simply swapping one set of “greats” for another.
Several contributors joined the event to share what the project meant to them: writing about figures like Sylvia Harris, Dorrit Dekk, Elizabeth Fitz-Simon, and others allowed them to honor designers who had shaped local histories, opened doors for future generations, and yet remained largely unknown outside their regions. Rebalancing the Canon relies on rigorous research to portray the whole life of each designer, including family, migration, cultural constraints, and the compromises required to navigate patriarchy while sustaining a career. Resnick and the book’s contributors emphasized how powerful it is for today’s students—many of them women and from multicultural backgrounds—to see themselves finally reflected in design history.
As Millman put it in closing, Rebalancing the Canon is more than a book; it’s a restorative act. It invites us to question who we’ve chosen to remember, who we’ve overlooked, and how much richer our field becomes when we expand the record instead of repeating it.
Register here to watch the discussion.
The post Rewriting Design History: Book Club Recap With Elizabeth Resnick appeared first on PRINT Magazine.