Category Archives: design
Hands on Research for Artists, Designers & Educators
Edited by Miriam Rasch, Jojanneke Gijsen, and Harma Staal (2024)
Hands On Research for Artists, Designers & Educators presents the research process through six actions: research by making, research of context, participatory research, reflecting on research, documenting research and making public. Each action is equally important and can be your starting point. The guide introduces the circular model of doing research visually, with many examples, images and practical tools. It highlights the unique and rich aspects of practice-based research, while being accessible and applicable to different disciplines.
Black, Queer, & Untold
Jon Key (2024)
Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. But in lectures, critiques, and in the books he read, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity or who got him. So he started asking himself questions:
What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer? A Queer graphic designer? Someone from the South? Could his identity be communicated through a poster or a book? How could identity be archived in a design canon that has consistently erased contributions by designers who were not white, straight, and male?
In Black, Queer, & Untold, acclaimed designer and artist Jon Key answers these questions and manifests the book he and so many others wish they had when they were coming up. He pays tribute to the incredible designers, artists, and people who came before and provides them an enduring, reverential stage – and in so doing, gifts us a book that takes its place among the creative arts canon. before and provides them an enduring, reverential stage – and in so doing, gifts us a book that takes its place among the creative arts canon.
Seed Pods of Democracy
Democracy Poster Project (2024)
The Democracy Poster Project explores the value of democracy and human rights through the visual art medium of posters, and proposes ways that design can act as a voice for participation in society. The Democracy Poster Project team (director Moon Jung Jang, along with curators Kyungwon Kim and Yumi Kang) contacted designers, illustrators, and visual artists around the world who have consistently expressed interest in issues of democracy and human rights, and who could disseminate these messages concisely and accurately through poster work.
In response, 51 participating artists (or teams of artists) crafted messages in different visual languages, producing 100 new posters and generating accompanying texts.
Participating artists acutely point out the reality of democracy’s retreat across various times and spaces and constantly ask questions about the causes. In addition, they address the core values of democracy such as equality, diversity of existence, and minority human rights, as well as structural discrimination and violence against women, the right to movement of the disabled, the right to work in a humane environment, and the right of refugees and immigrants to be respected. Their thoughts and expressions about resistance to the advancement of democracy and human rights, freedom through struggle, and methods for open empathy and solidarity continue to form complex and solid links.
Participating artists include designers and visual artists who represent the voice of the here and now through their various works and exhibitions at major art museums, including Karo Akpokiere, Kim Albrecht, Jonathan Barnbrook, Melinda Beck, Diana Ejaita, Mark Gowing, Guerrilla Girls, High on Type, Saki Ho, Minho Kwon, Sang Mun, This Ain’t Rock’n’Roll, Garth Walker, Kateryna Korolevtseva, Elaine Lopez, Studio Rejane Dal Bello, and others from around the world. Participants also include illustrators of social and cultural issues for influential media outlets and organizations such as The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Amnesty International.
In addition, the writings of invited authors Jung Keun-Sik, Kim Sang-kyu, Keiko Sei, and Ezio Manzini have also been compiled to ponder the questions “How do we represent issues of violence in movements for democracy and human rights?” “What does it mean to visually remember a history of violence by the state, and what are the possibilities and limitations of such visual expression?” “Where is activism currently taking place in visual culture and today?” and “What can design do for democracy?”
Posted in art, culture, design, exhibition, politics
Contact: Art and the Pull of Print
Jennifer L. Roberts (2024)
In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure, followed by release. Contact reveals how the physical properties of print have their own poetics and politics and provides a new framework for understanding the intelligence and continuing relevance of printmaking today.
The seemingly simple physics of printmaking brings with it an array of metamorphoses that give expression to many of the social and conceptual concerns at the heart of modern and contemporary art. Exploring transformations such as reversal, separation, and interference, Jennifer Roberts explores these dynamics in the work of Christiane Baumgartner, David Hammons, Edgar Heap of Birds, Jasper Johns, Corita Kent, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Robert Rauschenberg, and many other leading artists who work at the edge of the medium and beyond.
National Gallery of Art video lecture series:
Jennifer L. Roberts on Printmaking
Posted in art, culture, design, history, language, media, printmaking, technology, theory
Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism
Julia Watson (2019)
Three hundred years ago, intellectuals of the European Enlightenment constructed a mythology of technology. Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, this mythology ignored local wisdom and indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive. Today, we have slowly come to realize that the legacy of this mythology is haunting us.
Designers understand the urgency of reducing humanity’s negative environmental impact, yet perpetuate the same mythology of technology that relies on exploiting nature. Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia-old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without implementing soft systems that use biodiversity as a building block, designs remain inherently unsustainable.
Lo—TEK, derived from Traditional Ecological Knowledge, is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs, countering the idea that indigenous innovation is primitive and exists isolated from technology. It is sophisticated and designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems.
Posted in art, culture, design, environment, history, myth, science, technology
Ray Johnson c/o
Edited by Caitlin Haskell and Jordan Carter (2021)
Ray Johnson (1927–1995) was a renowned maker of meticulous collages whose works influenced movements including Pop Art, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art. Emerging from the interdisciplinary community of artists and poets at Black Mountain College, Johnson was extraordinarily adept at using social interaction as an artistic endeavor and founded a mail art network known as the New York Correspondence School. Drawing on the vast collection of Johnson’s work at the Art Institute of Chicago, this volume gives new shape to our understanding of his artistic practice and features hundreds of pieces that include artist’s books, collages, drawings, mail art, and performance documentation.
Posted in art, design, exhibition, language, media, semiotics, typography
Printmaking in Paris: The Rage for Prints at the Fin de Siècle
Fleur Roos Rosa de Carvalho and Marije Vellekoop (2013)
In the years between 1890 and 1905, Paris witnessed a revolution in printmaking. Before this time, prints had primarily served reproductive or political ends, but, as the century came to a close, artistic quality became paramount, and printmaking blossomed into an autonomous art form. This gorgeously illustrated and accessibly written book looks at the circumstances in which this terrific new enthusiasm for prints unfolded; the principal players in its development; and the various printmaking techniques being used.
Posted in art, culture, design, exhibition, history, printmaking
African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design
Ron Eglash (1999)
Drawing on interviews with African designers, artists, and scientists, Ron Eglash investigates fractals in African architecture, traditional hairstyling, textiles, sculpture, painting, carving, metalwork, religion, games, practical craft, quantitative techniques, and symbolic systems. He also examines the political and social implications of the existence of African fractal geometry. His book makes a unique contribution to the study of mathematics, African culture, anthropology, and computer simulations.
Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika
Saki Mafundikwa (2006)
Afrikan Alphabets will lead you to uncharted places in Afrikan cultures. This book is about the highly graphic pictographs, ideographs, and scripts devised and designed by Afrikans themselves. In Afrika, the harmony of art, nature and spirit is the rule, not the exception. In terms of the graphic arts, alphabets designed by Afrikans show that the spiritual line is free and unencumbered by the rule of the grid. Afrikan alphabets express ideas, systems of thought, cultural imperatives, aesthetic preferences, and spirit. They are one of the important keys to help unlock what has been kept hidden from so many for so long. These alphabets with their deeply meaningful graphic constructions show the intelligence and ingenuity of Afrikan peoples.
Posted in culture, design, history, language, typography
Fluxus Forms: Scores, Multiples, and the Eternal Network
Natilee Harren (2020)
While today the Fluxus collective is recognized for its radical neo-avant-garde works of performance, publishing, and relational art and its experimental, interdisciplinary approach, it was not taken seriously in its own time. With Fluxus Forms, Natilee Harren captures the magnetic energy of Fluxus activities and collaborations that emerged at the intersections of art, music, performance, and literature. The book offers insight into the nature of art in the 1960s as it traces the international development of the collective’s unique intermedia works — including event scores and Fluxbox multiples — that irreversibly expanded the boundaries of contemporary art.