Artist John Bielenberg to Talk About 'When Wrong is Right'

John Bielenberg

Artist John Bielenberg, a co-founder of FUTURE, the San Francisco-based rapid innovation firm that takes a radical humanitarian approach to accelerating positive change, will present a lecture entitled, “When Wrong Is Right.”

His talk, on Tuesday, Nov. 27, at 2:30 p.m. in Wilde Auditorium, is part of the Hartford Art School’s Auerbach Visiting Artist Lecture Series. The event is free and open to the public.

What Bielenberg does best is help companies and their people find the courage and the sense of humor to consider whole new, "wrong" ways of bringing their stories, ideas and innovations out into the world. Bielenberg feels so strongly about the value of thinking wrong that he created a program called Project M that is designed to inspire and educate young designers, writers, photographers and filmmakers by proving that their work—especially their wrongest thinking—can have a positive and significant impact on the world.

Project M has developed projects to help a conservation area in Costa Rica, micro-financing in Ghana, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the community of East Baltimore, connecting households to fresh water in Hale County, Alabama, and addressing the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Alabama.

Most recently, Bielenberg has partnered with Alex Bogusky and Rob Schuham to form COMMON, a new brand of capitalism that replaces competitive advantage with collaborative advantage. Bielenberg, Bogusky and Schuham believe that benefiting people, communities, society, the environment and future generations is the new advantage in business.

In his career, Bielenberg has won more than 250 design awards, was nominated for two National Design Awards from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, served on the AIGA national board of directors, and teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has acquired six of his projects and staged a solo exhibition in 2000. In addition, Bielenberg was awarded the Skandalaris Award for Design Entrepreneurship from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009 and was granted an honorary doctorate degree from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011.

Bielenberg's talk is made possible by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund and presented by the Visual Communication Design Department at the Hartford Art School.

For more information, contact Karen DeGrace, executive assistant to the dean of the Hartford Art School, at 860.768.4392 or degrace@hartford.edu.