A Parsons student and Army veteran Freddie Dessau recently won second place in a city-wide poster contest against sexual assault hosted by the NYPD.
The Second Annual NYPD Campus Sexual Assault Poster Contest was open to graduate and undergraduate students, offering a $2,500 for first place, $1,500 for second place, and $1,000 for third. The winners will have their designs either used as a poster or as flyers to hand out to city-based college campuses to raise unawareness about sexual assault.
“We know that campus sexual assaults are largely underreported, and we are determined to remove any roadblocks that might discourage victims from coming forward. We want victims to feel encouraged and supported to report to the police even if they have reported to their college or university,” the online contest instructions read.
According to Dessau, he was chosen out of 150 entries, and took home $1,500 for the prize. His design will be featured as a handout and pamphlet that will circulate around New York university campuses.
Dessau will use his prize money to support any travel he does over winter break he said in an email. Although originally from Ridgewood, New Jersey, he has spent more than 20 years elsewhere before he decided to pursue an MFA at Parsons.
Prior to Parsons, Dessau enlisted in the army in Idaho, and spent 23 years of military service as a cartographer in the snow belt of Fort Drum, New York. Dessau described himself as always having a passion for art and design and completed a BA in fine arts at UCLA before enlisting in the Army.
Dessau hopes to use his art in investigating trauma, specifically PTSD, and saw the poster contest as a way of exercising his craft, as well as producing something beneficial to his community.
“The message of it is really something I try to examine in my practice at Parsons,” Dessau said.
Dessau found out about the contest through an email circulated by Parsons. With the recommendation of Simone Douglas who is the department head of the MFA program, as well as Andrea Geyer, and colleague, Lisa McCleary, Dessau started to think of how he could use his work to get an important message across. He decided to create a conversation between two people via text message.
“I thought what is it that everybody does?” Dessau said.
With the use of the app TextMe, Dessau recreated a gender neutral text conversation between two friends about the resources and steps to take when one experiences sexual assault.
“Anyone can look at it and say I can relate to this,” Dessau said.
Photo by Julia Himmel