To scroll is to move forward, navigate, and traverse a space. The 2025 Boston University Graphic Design MFA Exhibition, Scroll(s), explores how we engage with information, craft, and form. The exhibition’s title is embedded with multiple meanings: from the ancient tradition of scrolls as vehicles for recordkeeping and storytelling to the contemporary act of scrolling through digital interfaces—our primary mode of accessing and processing vast amounts of information is intimately tied to the term.

Within this framework, Scroll(s) serves as both noun and verb. It refers to artifacts—documents that preserve thought and intent—but also to the action of moving through knowledge, ideas, and experiences. The twenty Graphic Design MFA candidates featured in this exhibition each chart their own paths through the field, navigating research and practice in ways that are simultaneously independent and interconnected. The pluralizing in the title acknowledges this multiplicity, reflecting a group of designers working in tandem, yet each with their own methodologies, inquiries, and outcomes.

The time spent in the MFA program can be understood as an ever-evolving scroll—one that unspools through a continuous stream of prompts and responses, design problems, and inventive solutions. Each iteration builds upon the last, each critique opens new possibilities, and each unexpected challenge—whether a printer error or a misaligned grid—becomes an opportunity for discovery. Like the motion of a scroll, learning in this space is fluid, recursive, and full of momentum. The projects presented here are not conclusions but moments of clarity in an ongoing exploration—waypoints in a larger trajectory of lifelong design inquiry.

Beyond its contemporary digital associations, the scroll as a physical object has a deep historical lineage, used across civilizations as a tool for recording and disseminating knowledge. The transition from scroll to codex to screen speaks to shifts not just in technology but in the ways we comprehend and encounter information. The designers in Scroll(s) engage with this lineage—some questioning the interface of the book, others investigating typography, motion, interaction, and the porous border between print and digital spaces. Their work resists a singular definition of graphic design, instead embracing an open-ended and evolving discipline.

Scroll(s) brings these investigations together in one space, inviting viewers to move through and engage with a collection of diverse ideas. As visitors navigate the work, the metaphor of scrolling takes on new resonance—reminding us that to design is to move forward, to search, to question, and to continually reframe our understanding of the world.

Kristen Coogan
Associate Professor of Art, Graphic Design

Christopher Sleboda
Associate Professor of Art, Graphic Design