Scarf for 'She Opened the Door' Conference Designed by Columbia Artists

By
Audrey Deng
January 28, 2020

The Columbia Alumni Association's (CAA) initiative She Opened the Door brings together alumnae from Columbia University in a women’s conference. This year, the 2020 She Opened the Door conference will take place on Feb. 9. The scarf commemorating this year’s conference was designed by a current School of the Arts student, Yuri Yuan, in collaboration with Teresa Saputo-Crerend '87CC, '92BUS.

To commemorate the event’s inauguration two years ago in 2018, the conference's co-chair Saputo-Crerend created a small keepsake in the form of a key necklace. Saputo-Crerend was inspired to create another keepsake for this year’s upcoming conference, and collaborated with Yuan to come up with a tasteful memento.

The School of the Arts' Dean of Student and Alumni Affairs Laila Maher and the Task Force connected Yuan, who is a member of the School's Interdisciplinary Arts Council, with Saputo-Crerend. The two met up to talk about She Opened the Door, and Yuan produced several designs. The final result was a light-blue scarf with the event’s signature key painted in black and white.

Yuan credits working with Professor Susanna Coffey for her exciting artistic journey at Columbia’s School of the Arts. In a comment to the university, Yuan said, “At a time when everyone was doing abstract [art] and I was doing representative art—I was really not the cool kid!—[Coffey] was really encouraging.”

Yuan studied art in high school in Singapore, then she moved to the U.S. to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA). She now lives and works in New York.

The scarf will be released ahead of the "She Opened the Door 2020" event on February 9.