Adriana Ridings00.
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About
Exhibition + Curatorial Projects
Publication + Editorial
Posters



I am a designer, curator, and educator.
My practice is similar to that of a visual anthropologist,
working at the intersection of culture, history, and the visual world.


I design to inspire curiosity.


MFA Graphic Design at CalArts (27’)

01.Exhibition + Curatorial Projects











Yesterday+Today+Tomorrow

In an age when content moves faster than we can absorb, the printed word provides a space for reflection, materiality, and deliberate engagement. Renewed interest in book design among young designers speaks to a longing for depth and a tangible connection to the printed word—an urge to slow down, to read, and to engage directly with language and context. 

Yesterday + Today + Tomorrow traces the interconnectedness of book design at CalArts across generations, through faculty and alumni work alongside publications that inspired and influenced their practice. Together, this collection of objects functions as a set of visual citations, revealing both lineage and divergence in an evolving conversation about how ideas travel and transform through design.

Co-Curator + Co-Designer

Exhibition displayed at The Reef, Los Angeles, 2025.




Designing Escapism: Disco, Pleasure, and Power in Francoist Spain

Designing Escapism is an exhibition currently in development. It examines the discotheques of Francoist Spain as sites of profound contradiction. Commissioned by an authoritarian regime to generate tourist revenue, they became laboratories of sensory liberation, bodily freedom, and political transgression. Through architecture, furniture, lighting, graphic design, and fashion, the exhibition asks how designed space can serve both an instrument of control and an engine of emancipation.


Curator & Designer









02.           Publication + Editorial     



Intertidal: Life and Labor at the Ocean’s Edge

Intertidal is a publication exploring stories of labor and lived knowledge tied to the ocean, and how those experiences generate a profound form of knowing. The design resists the literal: rather than illustrating the ocean, the typography does the work of evoking it. 




Squirrel Freeways

Squirrel Freeways is a response to Silvio Lorusso's critique of design culture's tendency to overclaim its own importance. Rather than disagree outright, it defends something smaller: the genuine pleasure of learning to see the world more expansively. A telephone pole becomes the entry point, an accidental neighborhood archive, a site of physical labor, an unintended freeway. The form follows the argument: the essay was printed as flyers and posted around the neighborhood in telephone pole vernacular, then collected into a booklet where blue and yellow flaps hold two voices in conversation,

*digital version of full essay coming soon*






03. Poster Designs