7 posts tagged “graphic design”
Prairie Avenue Bookshop, the fine bookstore for architecture and design in Chicago, is in midst of their going-out-of-business sale. It is very sad, as they held one of the finest stocks of design books I've ever seen anywhere. But do take advantage of the sale. I was there a couple of weeks ago and everything was 60% off. Now the discount is up to 70%, and I don't imagine the store will be open for much longer.
While certainly picked over, I still managed to score a few remarkable books and magazines. They used to have this one display case table with old European design magazines laid out. They were treated as precious commodities and priced for collectors. But for this liquidation they were all reduced to $5 apiece. So I bought a few issues of this magazine called Der Deutsche Tischlermeister (The German Tablemaster?), which offers an amazing peek into the Weimar culture of modern German design.
Check out the pics. As often is the case with these finds, it is the advertising that says the most.
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.
A few weeks ago my friend Kay, who moved to Montreal not long ago, came back to Chicago for a short visit. We managed to meet up for an evening. She brought for me an exhibition catalogue for a show in the McGill library called
The show consisted of works selected out of the collection of Marc Raboy, a professor at McGill, and which he donated to their library. The catalog is bilingual, of course, and laid out in an upside-down mirror image design. It is too bad that all the images are presented twice. There could have been twelve different reproductions instead of just six, twice. Still, all are images of publications I had never heard of.
The catalogue text makes mention of both the still-operational Black Rose Books and the American magazine, Scanlan's Monthly. Neither had I ever heard the story of how editor Warren Hinkle couldn't get an American company to print Scanlan's in 1970 for reasons of both political content (too radical!) and offending the unions (which dominated the printing trade then). He finally found a willing shop in St. Jean, Quebec.
I was looking for a children's book I loved from years ago on Alibris the other day. A browsing detour led me to this exhibition catalogue, which I could not pass up for the $10 asking price.
It is from a show that opened in February of 1971. It includes the text of Kenneth Frampton's 1968 essay "The Lost Avant Garde," which went miles in bringing the experimental arts of the early Soviet Union to a wider audience in the West, who were, of course, then searching for alternative models and histories high and low. Just imagining socially-engaged artists of the day, fueled by the cultural and political explosions of '68 and and after, seeing this work for the first time, puts one in a heady state.
The slim, now-fragile volume includes some terrific images I've never seen before. As is usual for me, I'm most interested in the graphic work. But there are some amazing pics of architectural work and theater sets, as well. Check the image below.
My email inbox has been hovering at around 1500 for the past year, up from about a hundred the year before. At this rate, I may have to declare email bankruptcy in about another ten years. But in the meantime I still get some enjoyment out of going through the inbox and sorting through the old emails.
The curator of this exhibition, Jesse Aaron Cohen, asked that people not reproduce images from the exhibition on their sites or blogs. I will respect that request, but you can see all the examples here. I love the Lucy Parsons letter.
Something we made and posted in Arawak City...
Today I viewed the Fifty Years of Helvetica show at the Museum of Modern Art. On this latest trip to New York, it was really the only show I was very excited about seeing. It consisted of about eight posters, a NYC subway station sign, a video loop, and a single display case holding a few type specimen sheets, cd covers, a galley of 36 pt. metal Helvetica. Oh, and the best thing in the show: a print of complete alphabets and figures of Helvetica and its Grotesk antecedent, each character printed in an overlaid manner, one style in blue and the other in red, so we can see the precise differences in the two. There wasn't nearly enough of that in the show. Meaning, typograhical context. The show proved well enough the ubiquity and versatility of Helvetica, but offered only minimal information on the genealogical front. And there was no evidence at all of consideration for the social and political context out of which Helvetica emerged as a graphic force.
But who cares, right? The Lester Beall posters on display from the permanent collection made up for the Helvetica show's deficiencies....
