Fashion designer and urban gardening advocate Ron Finley was the featured speaker for the second annual Kusske Lecture & Dialogue on December 1, 2022. Note: Contains strong language

Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Ron showed an early passion and talent for fashion, and started his innovative clothing company, The DROPDEAD. Collexion, in his family garage. The line was a top seller with highend retailers such as Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue and attracted the attention of many celebrities.

Finley is now widely known as the “Gangsta Gardener.” Frustrated by his community’s lack of access to fresh, organic food, and local policymakers’ resistance to alternative approaches, he inadvertently started a “HortiCultural” revolution when he turned the barren parkway in front of his home into an edible oasis in 2010. This led to the creation of the Ron Finley Project, which focuses on teaching communities how to transform food deserts into food sanctuaries and encouraging people to see their land as a regenerative resource. “Beauty In, Beauty Out.”

Following the keynote, Finley participated in a discussion with KDI CoPrincipals Linsey Griffin (Assistant Professor of Apparel Design and CoDirector of the Human Dimensioning Lab) and Carlye Lauff (Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director, Product Design), and Design Justice Director Terresa Moses (Assistant Professor of Graphic Design).

About the Kusske Design Initiative
A generous commitment from Manitou Fund to the University of Minnesota’s College of Design honors the memory of distinguished alumnus Christopher Arthur Kusske (BLA ’78). The Kusske Design Initiative (KDI) honors his legacy through widely inclusive events and collaborations among a growing community of broadminded designers. Chris’s emphases on interdisciplinary dialogue, cocreativity, and celebration of the natural world inspire solutions for planetaryscale issues. By combining values of ecological stewardship with the disciplinary spectrum that forms the college’s DNA, KDI programs and inquiries have transformative potential for the products we use and the environments we inhabit.