5 posts tagged “graphic art”

On the night of President Obama’s speech outlining his new strategy for the War in Afghanistan, I opted to listen to Emory Douglas instead. Anchor Graphics at Columbia College Chicago brought him in as their last visiting lecturer of the season.

 

Mr. Douglas made his name as the point man for visual communication and main artist for the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. His illustrations and graphics were featured in just about every issue of the Black Panther newspaper. In the party he held the title of Minister of Culture.

 

It was a marathon two-hour lecture. He went through nearly 200 slides. Most of them were of his classic work, from the Panther days, covering the provocative anti-police messaging of his early stuff to the graphics giving visual identity to the Panther social service work.

 

He ended by running through a selection of recent work, including this painted portrait of Black Panther Field Marshal Richard Aoki. After the lecture when I went up to get my copy of his monograph signed,

 

 

 

he confirmed for me that Aoki was indeed the man who scored the first cache of weapons for the Panthers. So the legends I've heard are true!

 

 

 

Also terrific in the new works is a picture of President Obama offering an apology for slavery. Mr. Douglas, whose burning political passions are tempered by a great sense of humor, remarked that the work was inspired by the imagined irony of the first president of African descent offering the apology for slavery to America’s descendents of African slaves. It is true; that is a real mind-bender!

 

 

 

The best question during the Q & A was offered by one Dawoud Bey, he of photo mastery and a longtime faculty member at Columbia College. He explained that as a youngster coming of age during the Panther days, and now an established figure on the official art scene, he could hardly wrap his head around the fact that LAMOCA mounted a large show of Mr. Douglas’s work, and that it earlier this fall traveled to the New Museum in New York. Dawoud’s question was simple: how on earth does Mr. Douglas reconcile in his own mind the bridging of what originated as a true revolutionary art that attracted the most malicious involvements of not only the local police but of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, and was done in the service of a movement that cost more than a few people their very lives, with the welcome, forty years later, offered him by the official and elite world of culture? Mr. Douglas’s answer was straightforward: there are now some very good people who inhabit that world professionally, and that it is possible to find allies who operate there. As for showing his work in the museums, he said only that they provide another outlet for the same messages he has always championed.  

Mister Koppa and I made the trip to the first ever Hamilton Wood Type Museum Wayzgoose.

What’s a wayzgoose? Back in the day it was the end of summer bash thrown by the master printer for his shop underlings and apprentices. And now, I guess, it’s the kind of event the Hamilton staff put together for us–“us” being a gathering of type nuts, artists, letterpress printers, typographers, graphic and type designers. About 50 were in attendance. Mister Koppa and I were just about in the middle of the pack, age-wise. It was good to see so many young people turning out, seeing this as a living thing.

We were treated to power point presentations by Rich Kegler and Juliet Shen on the first evening. Juliet Shen told the story of working with Pugent Sound Salish tribes to design a font for the preservation and continuation of the Lushootseed language, which is down to ten or less native speakers, and having the font cut as a new wood type by Hamilton.

 

She had an elegant explanation for why she approached Hamilton about producing a new face in wood type, and in a language that does not use the straightforward Latin alphabet. She said simply, working and printing in wood type is better for getting the young people interested in learning to read, speak, and write in the language.

 

The second day was organized around four different presentations, including a demonstration of the pantograph router by Norb Brylski, one of the old-timers from the Hamilton workforce. This man was a printer with his own shop first, and then after leaving that part of the trade spent years cutting wood type faces for Hamilton, in time becoming a master of the pantograph router, understanding all the nuances of the tool. This tool, in which the pantograph is machined to such a quality of stability and precision that it can be attached to a router run on pressurized air, was at the heart of the Hamilton production of wood type, and one of the main reasons decorative faces could be produced cheaply enough to be used widely in commercial printing.

 

All throughout the demonstration people got to ask him questions. Most were of a technical nature. Paul Aken asked him about the shoulder height and depth of the counter (sorry, those are cast type terms). I asked him how they measured the productivity of each pantograph operator. He said that management had figured out a standard of output, so many fonts in a given face in a given size in a given amount of time. I can’t remember if he said it was all charted out or not, but that’s how I’m picturing the information. The reason this is crazy to think about is, this was a pretty skilled kind of work, including having to cut by hand every single inside corner to a sharp angle for many faces, because the router bits all leave a round corner. Quantifying all that across the room full of pantagraph operator-craftsworkers, such that the information could be figured into larger decisions regarding the future prospects of the company, was probably a typical industrial efficiency problem for the time. I think it was one of the Moran brothers who noted that over the decades there had been a great many women in this occupation. I also asked Mr. Brylski if he was in a union. He was; I think he said it was the carpenters and joiners union. 

 

Richard Zauft, under whom I studied about thirteen years ago, led a hands-on print session using for the first time the newly unveiled Hamilton face, Carter Latin, the first typeface designed by Matthew Carter for wood type. Matthew Carter has done just about everything a guy can do in the field of typography and type design, but it turned out he hadn’t ever designed for wood type. So this, too, was (for type nuts, at least) a pretty special moment, and super fun to do. Hundreds of proofs were made over the course of the day, including many on paper taken from a shop scrap pile, with entertaining results. Matthew Carter was there, presiding like a pleased patrician grandfather.

 

Jim Moran gave us a wonderful introduction to and status report on the recently acquired inventory of printing blocks from the old Globe company of Chicago. I don’t know what the proper name of the business was. It might have been Globe Print, or Globe Printing, or Globe Show Print. They were in the business of letterpress printed advertising. Movie posters, rodeo, car racing, and circus posters, and signage for grocery stores and small retailers.  And some political signage, including a lot of blocks for the old Illinois US Senator Dirksen. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, in terms of a fusion of material and social history. Who were these people in the 40s, 50s, and 60s who were going to rodeos, circuses, and scary movies? The whole thing had the air of a healthy working class world, with its own amusements and nascent consumer economy. Jim made the point that some of the circus posters that feature clowns are actually quite sinister, with the clowns playing as figures of chaos and menace. So what was life like for the classes of citizenry who consumed the thrills and contrived scares of the circus midway and freak shows? Who shopped at the stores that advertised their meat discounts in the windows? And who Senator Dirksen wanted to reach? Lots to wonder about there. Unfortunately, not much is known about Globe. Jim is starting to get some leads on the company, people who may have been involved, but it sounds like that is in an early stage.

 

The Hamilton staff and volunteers are slowly making their way through an estimated 1400 blocks, many of them damaged, and all of them having arrived in a completely disorganized state. The story is, the Globe company cleared them out and packed them for storage, but then they were somehow left in a tractor semi-trailer for 25 years, and practically forgotten. A whole bunch of type came along with it that they are also sorting. Some of the blocks are just amazing, and the proofing of them is what is a great motivation for putting in the labor. 

Most of the blocks are carved or cut vinyl. But check out this one, which is pure woodcut, handcarved.

 This place is the mecca of wood type, no question. For the letterpress printer, there’s interesting stuff at every turn.

 

Nicolas Lampert and Jesse Graves came to town to lead a mud stencilling action for the Wisconsin Books to Prisoners campaign to end the Department of Corrections bad habit of denying prisoners from receiving used books from the outside. The ostensible rationale is to prevent contraband from entering prisons. But that makes no sense at all since mailings are examined anyway, and newly purchased books are allowed but present the very same threat. Moreover, the refusals seem to be arbitrary and inconsistent. And we're not even talking about books being sent by individuals; these are books coming from bookstores that sell or donate used books. And nevermind the fact that (as any book aficionado can tell you) good condition used books are hardly any different than newly purchased versions.

Anyway, it was a well-coordinated action. The super-organized Sarah Quinn got the whole thing going.

Then the twenty (give or take) people divided up into five teams, each with an assigned area, moving out from the UW campus.

Before heading out, Jesse Graves, the young artist who first perfected the roofing paper technique, gave us a quick demonstration.

Jesse, Nicolas, and myself formed one team: the smallest crew! We hit the sidewalks in front of the Memorial Union and then went up State Street. The streets were alive, it being a football Saturday–and homecoming, no less!

We made our way up the street, laying down a few stencils here and there, ultimately aiming for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. When we got there, we saw that one of the other crews beat us to the site; the sidewalk in front of the museum already had a nice, rad image laid out in mud. We went across the street, aiming for the federal courthouse. And there, too, the quicker crew beat us to it. But their image had been deliberately stomped out. Later we got the story. Some petty dictator security guy came out of the courthouse and harassed the activists. Our people didn't back down; it's only a little dirt, they pleaded, and went on with the project. By the time we got there, the earlier work was more than a little smudged. Of course, we put down another.

But what I really wonder is, was that security guard (one of the people from the other crew thought the guy might have been, in fact, a U.S. marshall, but who knows) heavily influenced by the bas relief wall design on the side of the Overture Center, directly across the street from the courthouse? Because there seemed to be, after the guy's footwork job, some aesthetic relationship between the two art works.

And speaking of World War II, check out this video I shot the other day, over at Lewis Koch's East Side work studio.

Lewis Koch shows WW II posters from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.

On Thursday I made it to the opening of the Just Seeds' exhibition in the Union Art Gallery on the UWM campus. The Union Art Gallery is one of the most difficult exhibition spaces I know of. The room footprint is highly irregular, the wall surface is that indestructible gray-tan pebbly Seventies concrete, and the ceilings are about twenty-five feet hight. In other words, it'd be a wonderful space for some really ambitious soft sculpture. But for 2-d work, it is sometimes a challenge to simply keep the space from completely overwhelming the art work. The fifteen Just Seeds members triumphed over the space and produced the most natural-feeling installation I've ever seen in that gallery, the conceit being a gallery representation of a crumbling highway overpass. That is to say, what Milwaukee will be one of these days.