The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is hosting a symposium and fall reception in conjunction with the exhibition, "Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age: Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection," on October 31, 1998. The symposium, "Graphic Designer Emigrants and Exiles," will take place in Brooks-Rogers Recital Hall in the Bernhard Music Center at Williams College. In the afternoon, the fall reception at the museum will open with a gallery talk by co-curators Deborah Rothschild, curator of exhibitions at WCMA, and Darra Goldstein, chair of the Department of German and Russian at Williams College and a specialist in Russian Modernism and art.

The symposium will begin at 9:30 a.m. with opening remarks from WCMA director Linda Shearer and will include lectures by three prominent figures in the field of graphic design. It will conclude at 12:30 p.m. after a panel discussion moderated by co-curators Deborah Rothschild and Darra Goldstein.

The first presentation in the symposium, "European Exile Designers in America: An Overview," will be given by Victor Margolin, Associate Professor of Art and Design History at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1982. Author of numerous articles and essays on contemporary design issues and history, his most recent book is The Struggle for Utopia: Lissitzky, Rodchenko, Moholy-Nagy (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Lorraine Wild, a graphic designer and scholar who has been teaching at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles since 1985, will give the second presentation, "From Exiles to Main Street." Her work and writing have been published in numerous periodicals and anthologies. In the spring of 1998 an exhibition of her recent work was on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wild has served on the national boards of both the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Society for Typographic Arts (now the American Center for Design).

The final presentation will be given by Constantin Boym, a New York-based designer, educator, and writer. He has headed his own design consultancy since 1968 and has been teaching at Parsons School of Design since 1986, where he is now a professor and coordinator of the Product Design program. Boym, whose work has appeared in numerous publications, is also the author of the book New Russian Design (Rizzoli, 1992).

At 3:30 p.m. WCMA's fall reception will begin with a gallery talk at the museum by Deborah Rothschild and Darra Goldstein, offering visitors an in-depth view of the exhibition, "Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age: Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection." The reception ends at 5:30 p.m.

Both the symposium and the reception are free and open to the public. To register for the symposium, call 413-597-2037.