Rebekah Modrak

Rebekah Modrak is an artist and writer whose practice is at the intersections of art, activism, critical design, and creative resistance to consumer culture. Her Internet-based artworks analyze brand messaging. Her Re Made Co. (remadeco.org) presents as a faux online company to critique the appropriation of working-class identities and the revitalization of traditional male roles. RETHINK SHINOLA (rethinkshinola.com) exposes a complex agenda of marketing the White savior myth.

Modrak is co-editor of the recently published Radical Humility: Essays on Ordinary Acts (Belt 2021) in which twenty writers consider humility as a state of being with the power to impact institutions, systems, families, and individuals. She is the lead author of Reframing Photography (Routledge 2011), a book critically exploring photographic representation, ethics, re-enactments, mediated vision, and other issues within the image-based world.

Modrak has written and published a series of articles about the relationship between brand strategies, gender- and class-based identity, race, and culture jamming, including “My Work is Yours to Do What I Want” (Media-N, 2021); “How DC Mayor Bowser Used Graffiti to Protect Public Space” (The Conversation, 2020); “Entrepreneurship 407: White Supremacy, Benevolent Institutions, and Shinola” (New Art Examiner, 2018) and “Bougie Crap” (Infinite Mile, 2015) which consider the “partnership” between Shinola and the College for Creative Studies, and the ethics and effects of this collaboration on design, education, and gentrification; and “Learning to Talk Like an Urban Woodsman” (Consumption Markets & Culture, 2015), among others.

Modrak is Professor at Stamps School of Art at the University of Michigan. She earned her BFA from the School of Art at Alfred University and her MFA from the Department of TransMedia at Syracuse University. Her hometown is Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh.