The Verasphere Free your mind and your art will follow.

Program: Fashion The Design Division at CCA welcomes The Verasphere, Michael Johnstone and David Faulk, as our third round of speakers in the 2023 Spring Design Lecture Series. These live lectures bring us together across time zones and disciplines as we meet leading designers, strategists, curators, and educators to speak about contemporary practice, discourse, and making. Michael Johnstone and David Faulk join us as guests of the Fashion Program and are introduced by Fashion Chair Greg Climer as San Francisco legends who have worked together for more than 25 years. Johnstone starts the talk with drawings he made in high school– ‘70’s style swirls and curls, figures with long hair and tall boots, carefully penned on small rocks, left at river beds for people to find. The seeds of playfulness and generosity that blossom over decades are there in those anonymous gifts. From there Johnstone and Faulk take us on a tour of their character Mrs. Vera, born early in their partnership from a need to do something light and fun. It was the 80’s, and Johnstone describes it as a heavy time with the AIDS epidemic ravaging the community. Johnstone was working with friends staging public puppet shows, painting sets, making costumes, telling stories. Facing his own health challenges, he and Faulk started making and wearing costumes and snapping pictures. “We were surrounded by so much darkness, we needed joy,” says Johnstone. You need to watch the talk to really get the feeling, but thin