from the Archive: Barbara Nessim

Barbara Nessim’s style features fluid, graceful linework and rhythmic compositions. Her elongated figures, simplified features, and expressive gestures blend fashion drawing, psychedelic art, and modernist design. She imaginatively transmogrifies the human form, merging faces with patterns or integrating bodies into decorative elements.

Even in early digital work, she maintained organic fluidity despite technical constraints. Her art explores relationships—between people, environments, and visual elements—suggesting movement and narrative. Bold, intuitive color choices enhance mood and rhythm. Whether working digitally or traditionally, her distinct style balances commercial illustration with fine art, emphasizing elegance, transformation, and connection.

Starting in the 1960s, she created distinctive illustrations for major publications like Ms. and Rolling Stone, combining bold colors with themes of gender and human relationships.

In the 1980s, Nessim experimented with early digital illustration as a resident at TIME Video Information Services. During her time there she created the Computer Heads series using the Norpak IPS-2 Telidon computer systems. TIME gave her access to their offices after regular business hours, where she would create digital artworks at night. To document each piece, she used a setup that included either a 35mm or Polaroid camera positioned in front of the Norpak computer screen. The resulting slides could then be used to make prints of the digital works.

Christa May {she/they} is a designer, researcher, and cultural worker based in Brooklyn, NY. The fundamental ethos that drives her two-decade-long practice is the mission to integrate design into conversations earlier to make objects and information accessible — working toward more socially just and ecologically sound systems.

She is currently working on a thesis titled They Have You by the Ovaries: Commodification of Reproductive Biology for a MA in Design Research, Writing, and Criticism {D-Crit} at the School of Visual Arts {SVA}. Christa holds another graduate degree from Pratt Institute in Arts and Cultural Management and a BFA from The University of Oklahoma with dual majors in Visual Communications and Art History.

Christa recently completed a 4.5-year tenure working on visual design and design education projects for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, while concurrently serving 1.5 years on the founding team of the nascent Smithsonian American Women's History Museum. Her experience spans multiple departments in museums, UX/UI design in startups, marketing and communications at ad agencies and in-house, and taught design to undergraduates at ACM@UCO from 2011-2013.

Her fellowships include a 2024 fellowship with the NYC Public Design Commission {PDC} — which promotes equitable, sustainable design with oversight of civic structures, landscape architecture, and art on City-owned property; a 2022-2023 'Design Justice as Practice' fellowship with Center for Urban Pedagogy {CUP}; and NPR's 'How I Built This' Summit fellowship in 2018.

In addition to working on her thesis, she currently contributes writing about design to the People's Graphic Design Archive. Christa is also a painter, and one of her works is currently on display at the Smithsonian Staff Show on the National Mall through 2025.