Art professor expands graphic design’s boundaries
Drew Sisk combines traditional artistic methods and emerging technologies to reimagine the creative potential of graphic design. It’s an interdisciplinary approach that began as an undergraduate at Furman University, where he studied studio art and Asian studies, and evolved while earning his Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“At my graduate school program, we were all interested in making installation work, things that were more experimental, playing with work at different scales, and challenging the notion of what graphic design could be,” said Sisk, an assistant professor in the Clemson University Department of Art.
Sisk has worked in industry and academia, with stints as an associate creative director at design firm EM2 and a book designer at Duke University Press. He taught at Tennessee Tech University before joining Clemson in Fall 2023 to lead the new graphic design studio emphasis area in the Department of Art’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program.
Whether he’s teaching a beginning course or a senior studio, Sisk seeks a balance between providing structured direction and offering creative flexibility. He views his classroom as a space of “flattened hierarchy” where student voices are elevated.
“I have buckets of knowledge and ways of working that I want to build, but I always want to leave room for their interests,” Sisk said.
For Sisk, adaptability is essential. That holds especially true now in the age of artificial intelligence.
“The constant for us (as graphic designers) has always been technological change,” he said. “For me, the emphasis is always building critical thinking skills, building strong rigor in terms of concept because that’s always going to carry students through.”
One of Sisk’s current research interests is a critical engagement with hallucination, or when generative AI models confidently produce inaccurate or fabricated responses. His multimedia installation “Pangrams from the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus,” featuring an AI-created typeface and a series of pangrams generated by ChatGPT, asks how this technology is transforming human connection to language, text and typography.
Students in his advanced classes have also considered these ideas, reading critical theory on AI while experimenting with new tools. For one recent project, called Hallucinations at the Library, students generated type, text and images for an imaginary book in the on-campus Emery A. Gunnin Architecture Library.
When Sisk brings the concepts that he is exploring into the classroom, it reflects his belief that teaching is “another kind of art inquiry … an equal part of the practice.”
“I always learn more from the students than they learn from me,” Sisk said. “What they’re enthusiastic about, the things that they ask questions about — that’s the kind of thing that makes me really excited.”
