Name: Virginia MOCA Art + Design Convening
Start: 2026-06-13T09:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-06-13T16:00:00-04:00
Location: Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art

The Virginia MOCA Art + Design Convening brings together artists, designers, architects, and creative practitioners for a full day of featured conversations, concurrent breakout sessions, and opportunities to connect, exchange ideas, and celebrate local creative work. Inspired by Seamless: Art and Design and the opening of Virginia MOCA’s new home, this is a day built around one idea: what happens when creative disciplines stop working in isolation and start working together.
This year’s convening features a conversation with Andy Howell and Eric Haze, both exhibiting artists in Seamless: Art and Design, in conversation with Virgina MOCA Senior Curator Heather Hakimzadeh.
SCHEDULE
9:00 AM — Check-in, coffee, and breakfast
10:00 AM — Welcome and opening remarks
10:15 AM — Featured Conversation: Our New Home
11:15 AM — Break
11:30 AM — Featured Conversation: From the Streets to the Studio
12:30 PM — Lunch, time to visit exhibitions, connect, and explore
1:30 PM — Breakout Session Block 1
2:30 PM — Break
2:45 PM — Breakout Session Block 2
3:45 PM — Closing gathering and reflections
4:00 PM — End of convening
FEATURED CONVERSATIONS
OUR NEW HOME | 10:15 AM
Every decision in designing a museum is a creative choice, from how light moves through the galleries to where a sign guides you around a corner. Virginia MOCA Executive Director Alison Byrne sits down with architect Michael Schnekser of Tymoff+Moss to talk about the vision, the process, and the full team of collaborators, including Hourigan Construction, Creative, and LVCK, who brought Virginia MOCA‘s new home to life.
FROM THE STREETS TO THE STUDIO | 11:30 AM
Andy Howell, Virginia Beach native and co-founder of New Deal Skateboards, helped define the visual language of street skating before going on to create work for McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. Eric Haze shaped the visual identity of hip-hop’s golden era, designing iconic logos and album art for the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy. Both are exhibiting artists in Seamless: Art and Design and both have spent decades working across disciplines and industries. Virginia MOCA Senior Curator Heather Hakimzadeh leads a conversation about what it actually looks like to build a career that refuses to stay in one lane.
BREAKOUT SESSIONS
Breakout sessions have limited capacity. After registering, you will receive an email to rank your top session choices for each block. Sessions are assigned based on your preferences and availability.
BLOCK 1 — 1:30 PM
Immersive Design
What happens when a theatre maker, director, producer, an installation artist, and two architects and digital fabricators all work toward the same creative vision? Thom White of Work Program Architects and Patrick Mullins of ROŪGE VA bring together a group of practitioners working across immersive design to unpack what deep, cross-disciplinary collaboration actually looks like when it comes together.
Concept to Cafe
What does it take to design a cohesive brand identity for a real, functioning space, where the brand lives on a wall, a menu board, a tote bag, and a wayfinding sign all at once? Ron Thompson of ITALIC walks through the process of bringing a complete identity system to life across architecture, graphic design, illustration, and signage, using a major real-world client as the anchor.
Craft in the Age of AI
Every creative discipline is wrestling with the same questions right now. What is authorship when a tool can generate in seconds what used to take days? Where does the value of handmade work live? Jeff White of Second Sight Creative leads an honest conversation about craft, creativity, and what it means to make something that’s genuinely yours.
Behind the Wall
There is a lot that happens before the doors open. Dave Culpepper, gallery & exhibitions manager at Virginia MOCA, pulls back the curtain on what it actually takes to present art in a contemporary museum, from working with curators and artists to building and designing moveable gallery walls, pedestals, hanging and displaying artworks, and getting the lighting just right. A rare look at the collaborative process that makes exhibitions possible.
BLOCK 2 — 2:45 PM
The Business of Being Multidisciplinary
Have A Good Day Studio doesn’t just create, they host. Founder Ethel Grace Daito Delacruz shares how she’s built a multidisciplinary practice across strategy, design, production, and live experiences, all rooted in a genuine belief that creative work is about caring for people as much as it is about making things.
Behind the Wall
There is a lot that happens before the doors open. Dave Culpepper, gallery & exhibitions Manager at Virginia MOCA, pulls back the curtain on what it actually takes to present art in a contemporary museum, from working with curators and artists to building and designing moveable gallery walls, pedestals, hanging and displaying artworks, and getting the lighting just right. A rare look at the collaborative process that makes exhibitions possible.
While We Wait
A curated group of creative practitioners from different disciplines are given the same design prompt weeks in advance. During this session they each present their response. Facilitated by Ryan Fremeau of Work Program Architects, the result is a live demonstration of how discipline shapes thinking and how the same question can lead to completely different answers.
Soundings: Art, Ecology, Collaboration
What happens when an artist, a landscape designer, an art therapist, and a botanical garden all work toward the same goal? Brendan Baylor of Old Dominion University and Kelly Morse of 70|30 Design Studio share the story of Soundings, a socially engaged art project housed in a converted shipping container with a vegetated roof at Norfolk Botanical Garden, and what the process of making it revealed about the messiness and magic of true interdisciplinary collaboration.
TICKET INFORMATION
Members: $75 Nonmembers: $90
Breakfast and lunch are included with your ticket.
A limited number of need-based scholarships are available for those who would like to attend but are unable to cover the cost of registration. To inquire, please contact [email protected].
All ticket sales are final and non-refundable.
ACCESSIBILITY
Virginia MOCA is committed to making this event accessible to all. Please contact us in advance if you have accessibility needs and we will do our best to accommodate you.