Delay, Deny, Design
Senior Thesis
Art and design have long been a powerful means of expression, serving as both a tool for social resistance and mechanisms of cultural control. Throughout history, art has been harnessed to challenge authority,
mobilize communities, and amplify marginalized voices.
Artistic expression has long served as a powerful tool for social commentary and rebellion, while also being co-opted by dominant powers to reinforce ideologies, control narratives, and manipulate public perception. Delay, Deny, Design explores how art and design intersect with popular culture and power dynamics, revealing their unique and complex role in shaping cultural narratives.
The contextualization of art and design within their social and political environments reveals how visual language can both reinforce and resist dominant ideologies. My design practice engages directly with these themes, exploring how contemporary art and design can challenge power structures and offer new perspectives. By examining works across different historical periods and genres and integrating insights from my own work, this study investigates how art and design function as both reflective and transformative forces within society
as a protest in itself.
USAF574-55
USA Flag Redesign
USAF574-55 is my reimagining of the United States flag, designed to challenge narratives of representation, exclusion, and national identity in its symbolism.
The flag features the original 50 solid stars plus five hollow stars representing American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The residents of these territories lack full political representation. The hollow stars acknowledge their presence while highlighting their exclusion.
The traditional 13 stripes are replaced by 574 stripes, one for each federally recognized Indigenous tribe in the U.S. today. This honors Indigenous presence, resilience, and the existence of the thousands of tribes that existed before European contact with North America.
Through these changes, USAF574-55 invites reflection on the complexities of inclusion and the ongoing evolution of American identity.
How High?
Mixed-Media Installation
How High? is a satirical mixed-media installation critiquing how major corporations readily comply with political demands to protect profits, particularly in the context of tariffs imposed during Donald Trump’s presidency. The title twists the phrase “When someone says ‘jump,’ you ask ‘how high?’” into a commentary on corporate obedience.
In the piece, Mickey Mouse acts as a metaphor for corporate America while diving down a bold red market graph into a mound of Monopoly money, prioritizing profit over people. By merging pop culture iconography with economic symbolism, the installation uses scale, placement, and humor to expose the entanglement of politics, profit, and power.
Arming the Arts
Ready-Made Ammo Box
Arming the Arts reclaims the language and aesthetics of militarism to interrogate systems of power, propaganda, and resistance. At its center is a repurposed ammunition box, originally designed to carry destruction, transformed into a vessel for ideas. Inspired by Duchamp’s ready-mades, this minimal physical alteration creates a radical conceptual shift that challenges viewers to reconsider the object’s meaning and use.
Through the use of my thesis title, Delay, Deny, Design, the work references two institutional strategies of harm: the “Delay, Deny, Defend” protocol from active shooter drills and Jay M. Feinman’s book exposing how insurance companies obstruct justice by stalling claims. Both reveal how bureaucratic language suppresses truth and avoids accountability.
Arming the Arts confronts the intersections of design, policy, and power, asserting the radical potential of visual culture to disrupt, expose, and reimagine. It highlights how art itself can be wielded as a weapon and used to challenge systems of oppression and reclaim narratives. By turning a symbol of militarism into a conceptual vessel, the project invites reflection on how art, language, and form can be weaponized and reclaimed, challenging us to rethink what we carry, protect, and choose to defend.
Monopopuli
Monopoly for the People
Monopopuli is a reimagination of a Monopoly board highlighting sites or American protest history. Each space on the Monopoly board is replaced with a historically significant location tied to the acts of resistance, civil disobedience, or protest for social justice. Monopopuli attempts critique how systems of power often commodify space while erasing the histories that once unfoleded within it.
Mapping Flaws
Postcard Duo
Mapping Flaws is a two-part postcard series visualizing the inherent imbalances of the U.S. Electoral College, a system that distorts democratic representation. Originally designed as a compromise between population and state-based voting, the Electoral College now produces outcomes that often contradict the popular vote, giving smaller state disproportionate influence and undermining “one person, one vote.”
The first postcard compares each state’s population share to its electoral votes, highlighting this imbalance. The second shows the disconnect between the Electoral College outcome and the popular vote, featuring key elections like 2000 and 2016 where this disparity decided the presidency.
Drawing from protest art and activist infographics, the postcards are designed for distribution and display as tools for civic education and political critique.
Mapping Flaws questions how visualizing power shapes perception and exposes uneven representation. In a time of political division and voter suppression, it argues design can make invisible imbalances visible and urges viewers to rethink democracy and demand fairer systems.
Chance
Chance explores the fragile reality of human rights by reframing them as a matter of luck. Articles of human rights are printed onto counterfeit Monopoly Chance cards, highlighting how access to safety, freedom, and dignity is often determined simply by where and when a person is born.
By borrowing the visual language of a game rooted in accumulation, risk, and power, the project questions how something as fundamental as human rights can be influenced by structures of capital rather than a universal guarantee.
In my thesis exhibition, the stack of Chance cards was displayed face down, inviting viewers to draw one themselves. This interactive gesture positioned the audience within the work, prompting them to physically experience the randomness the project critiques and to reflect on how rights, protections, and opportunities can feel similarly arbitrary depending on the conditions of one’s birth.