Rebeca Mendez

Biography

Méndez was born and raised in Mexico City. She received her BFA (1984) in Communication Design and her MFA (1996) in media art and design from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Her art and design work has been exhibited and collected by institutions such as the SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art]), The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museo Jose Luis Cuevas in Mexico City, and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. She has her own studio RMCD: Rebeca Méndez Communication Design in partnership with writer and strategist Adam Eeuwens, who is also her husband. Through her studio, she has collaborated with video artist Bill Viola, architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis, architect Greg Lynn, GLFORM, artist Ruben Ortiz Torres, and with film director Mike Figgis.

Featured works

Rebeca Méndez Communication Design’s clients include The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the Guggenheim Berlin, The Getty Museum and MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Los Angeles. As creative director of Brand Integration Group, Ogilvy & Mather, NY and Los Angeles (1999–2003), Rebeca lead global brand identity projects for clients such as IBM, Motorola, BP (British Petroleum), AT&T Wireless, and Mattel. In 2004, Méndez was invited to, and won, a competition to design the user interface to the Microsoft Home — the premier venue for communicating what Microsoft sees as possible for technology in the home of the future. In collaboration with architect and 2005 Pritzker Prize Laureate Thom Mayne of Morphosis, Méndez created two permanent installations for Mayne's new building: The Recreation Center at The University of Cincinnati. Her work was exhibited at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, France—as part of Thom Mayne and Morphosis retrospective: Morphosis: Continuities of the Incomplete in 2006. Her works have also been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, NY. In addition, Méndez recently designed a wayfinding masterplan for Caltech, with architect Richard Weinstein and Cooper-Robertson Architects.

Works

Rebeca Méndez lectures nationally and internationally—from Tijuana to Taipei—and her work has been subject of numerous publications and exhibitions such as ‘Clean New World: Culture, Politics and Graphic Design], 2002’ curated by Maud Lavin, ‘Women Designers in The USA, 1900–2000: Diversity and Difference, 2001’, ‘The National Design Triennial: Design Culture Now, 2000’, curated by Ellen Lupton, a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, curated by Aaron Betsky, 1998, and ‘Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture’, 1996.

Awards

In 2012, Méndez won the Communications Design Award of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s National Design Award program. She was nominated as a candidate for this award in 2005. Méndez has served as jury member in numerous graduate academic reviews, among them for architects Zaha Hadid and Greg Lynn at Harvard University School of Design, and Hani Rashid at UCLA, Architecture Department. She also served as chair of the Design Jury for the Art Director Club of New York Annual Awards, 2007.

Méndez was awarded the 2010 California Community Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship for Visual Artists, and the 2013 City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Individual Artist Fellowship. In 2017, she was awarded the AIGA Medal for her work "challenging and transforming academia and design with her innovative interplay of identity and culture."

Rebeca Méndez is in the advisory board of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts), Los Angeles Chapter, Peace Over Violence, Los Angeles, and in the Institute for the Future of the Book.