Acta Non Verba: The Art of Marielle Plaisir

Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami

Curated by Jorge Luis Gutierrez

 

For Acta Non Verba — meaning “deeds, not words” — I created a graphic identity that visually embodied the dualities in Marielle Plaisir’s work: softness and struggle, memory and resistance, ornament and critique. The centerpiece of the identity is the “O” in Non — filled with a custom lace and barbed wire motif — a symbol of the entanglement between femininity and control, vulnerability and survival. When the artist saw it, she told me it spoke directly to the themes she channels through her paintings, textile works, performances, and installations.

 

Plaisir’s exhibition, curated by Jorge Luis Gutiérrez, explored how modern acceleration and hyper-productivity have fractured our sense of memory and identity. Using delicate materials and theatrical staging, her work reclaims aesthetics traditionally associated with women and repurposes them to critique colonial narratives, racism, and cultural erasure.

 

The exhibition guide was designed to mirror the narrative’s spatial complexity — with a series of arched frames that reference sacred architecture and altarpieces. The internal layout moves visitors through her works in distinct zones, with careful pacing, dense visual layering, and textual deconstruction.

 

This project was deeply collaborative and concept-driven — one that required graphic subtlety as much as clarity. Every element, from typography to gallery mapping, was developed to support the artist’s vision of memory as a living act, not a static artifact.