Tuesday, March 31, 7 pm
Ellen Lupton, Baltimore

1. What music were you into before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

(1)  (2)  (3)

Aretha Franklin (1),  Donna Summer (2), and Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra (3)

2. Who were your heroes before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

Edward Hopper, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver.

3. What were your obsessions before becoming ELLEN LUPTON?

Vintage clothes, “gourmet” cooking, and worrying about my weight.

4. What were your dreams before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

To be an artist

5. What were you reading before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

(1)

(2)

(3)

Kurt Vonnegut (1),  Erica Jong (2), and and VIVA magazine (3)

6. What did you use to collect before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

Books, toy frogs, and old rayon dresses.

7. Who were you before ELLEN LUPTON?

Urban post-bohemian teenager.

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Ellen Lupton’s prolific career spans the realms of design practice, education, criticism, and curating, and is specifically aimed at bringing design awareness to a broader audience. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992, Lupton has organized numerous exhibitions, including the National Design Triennial (2000, 2003, 2006), Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age (1999), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002). In addition to the robust catalogues that accompany these shows, she has written and co-authored the best-selling books Thinking with Type (2004), D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), D.I.Y. Kids (2007), and most recently Graphic Design: The New Basics (2008). With J. Abbott Miller, Lupton’s essays on design and culture were published in Design Writing Research (1996). Her writing has been featured in magazines such as Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis. She has a regular column, “The El Word,” in Readymade magazine and her editorial illustrations have been published in the New York Times. Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, the profession’s highest honor.

www.elupton.com

Tuesday, March 24, 7 pm
Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam
Marieke Stolk and Danny van den Dungen

1. What music were you into before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?

( 1) ( 2) ( 3)

( 4) ( 5) ( 6)

(7) ( 8) ( 9)

The Cramps(1) , Suicidal Tendencies(2),  The Zombies (3) , The Beatles (4),  The Specials(5),  Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (6), Prince (7),  Japan(8) , The Pixies (9).

2. Who were your heroes before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?

(1) (2  ) (3) (4) (5)

Pushead (1), Savage Pencil (2),  Debbie Harry (3), Marlene Dietrich (4), Charlie Chaplin (5),  My friends .

3. What were your obsessions before becoming EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?
Drawing, reading, skateboarding, punk music; Horror; Drawing, reading, making mix-tapes.

4. What were your dreams before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?
To become a comic artist; To open a bar; To become a tap-dancing architect.

5. What were you reading before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?

(1) (2) (3)

(4) (5) (6)

Science fiction (mostly short stories by writers such as Ray Bradbury) (1),  Edgar Allen Poe (2) , Willem Elsschot (especially ‘Lijmen / Het Been’) (3),
Hanif Kureishi (4), Paul Auster (5), Harry Crews (6).

6. What did you use to collect before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?
Comics, fanzines; Posters; Records.

7. Who were you before EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?

In no specific order:
Danny van den Dungen, Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers.

(1)

Danny van den Dungen, Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers with Wim Crowel

—-

Based in Amsterdam and founded in 1997 by Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers, and Danny van den Dungen, Experimental Jetset has been consistently reinterpreting the implications of modernism, often from the perspective of a youth-based counterculture. The studio is perhaps best known to U.S. audiences from their appearance in the documentary Helvetica (2007), and their dogmatic use of that typeface has become a defining aspect of their work and has influenced new generations of graphic designers. Experimental Jetset’s iconic print work explores ways in which we are both shaped by and help shape our material environment. Projects for cultural clients include collaborations with the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Purple Institute, Centre Pompidou, Colette, Dutch Post Group, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Le Cent Quatre, De Theatercompagnie, and 2K/Gingham, which released their iconic John&Paul&Ringo&George T-shirt design. The studio’s work has been exhibited in galleries across the world, and in 2007 New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired a large selection of their projects for inclusion in its permanent collection. Since 2000, members of Experimental Jetset have been teaching at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

www.experimentaljetset.nl

Tuesday, March 17, 7 pm
David Reinfurt, New York
O-R-G & Dexter Sinister

While at Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair last fall, I was fortunate enough to catch David Reinfurt at the Dexter Sinister booth for a brief chat about the conception of DS and about a project they produced for a conference on contemporary artists’ books commissioned by the Art Libraries Society of New York.

(Photo by Jessica Williams)

On Dexter Sinister:

“It originally started out as a project for the Manifesta Six Biennial, which was supposed to be staged in Nicosia on the island of Cyprus. They took the money that would originally pay for a biennial and restaged it as a six month long art school. For that they asked Stuart Bailey and I to come up with a proposal for the graphic design of the book. We decided to do something a lot like the way they organized the exhibition itself, which was to take the money and resources of what would usually go into printing and distributing a catalogue and set up something that had a more direct relationship to what actually was needed at the time. If it’s a six month art school you don’t need to make a 296 page catalog and send it all over the world. Things were needed in much smaller numbers so we proposed to set up a printing workshop in the city of Nicosia and make all of the materials there in this kind of vitrine where we’d be working with borrowed printers or people from the school who are artists to make the publications just in the numbers that are needed. It was just our direct response to what was actually needed rather than printing 1,000 because that’s what an off-set printer could do.

We worked on that project for a year and a half in a store-front downtown in the old city. Everything was set up, but the project was canceled. Around the same time, we had found a space on the lower east side that we decided would be a good place to have a bookstore to sell some of the things we made. It was like a joke “Wouldn’t it be nice to have some presence for this project in New York…” but then when it was canceled, we just took a lot of the ideas and brought them to New York and just re-staged them in our space there. It sounds like everything was premeditated, but it wasn’t at all. It was just one kind of thing to the next. As soon as we had the underground storefront in New York, it didn’t make sense to do any printing there because it was so tiny. But a bookstore made sense, so we started running the space as a bookstore one day a week and the rest of the time as a studio.”

EVERY DAY THE URGE GROWS STRONGER TO GET A HOLD OF AN OBJECT AT VERY CLOSE RANGE BY WAY OF ITS LIKENESS, ITS REPRODUCTION:

“This project was done for the Arts Libraries conference at the MOMA which we spoke at also. They asked us to make a book for the conference which was on contemporary artists’ books. So we decided to make this, which is a collection of Portable Document Formats (PDFs) that are on our online library. We fit each of the PDFs onto 8-page signatures and produced them on a stencil printing machine.

Each of the Arts Librarians takes one of these sets, binds them, and puts it into their libraries. When we set up the online library we had this model in mind; that it would distribute and just push things out into the world and not necessarily circulate, lend or do something else. This was a nice project to do because it hits a few things we’re interested in, like the tension between the free thing online and the thing you hold in your hand, sealing it up and putting it into a library versus the ‘always, everywhere’ quality of a PDF.”

—

A vanguard among a recent wave of young designers whose practices blur the lines between the worlds of client-driven projects and critical investigation, David Reinfurt melds highly conceptual ideas with technological experimentation. After receiving his MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University in 1999 and working as an interaction designer at IDEO in San Francisco, he founded the studio O-R-G in New York, where his clients included the New York Times, AIGA NY, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Brill’s Content, and Dean Sakamoto Architects, among others. In 2006, with graphic designer Stuart Bailey, Reinfurt established Dexter Sinister, a small workshop/bookstore on the Lower East Side. Counter to the assembly line realities of today’s large-scale publishing, the studio’s process involves working on-demand, using inexpensive local machinery, considering alternate distribution strategies, and collapsing distinctions of editing, design, production, and distribution into one efficient activity. Dexter Sinister was featured at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in Switzerland and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Reinfurt has written for magazines such as the New York Times Magazine, Dot Dot Dot, Social Text, Visual Communications (UK), Modern Painter, Metropolis M, Idea Magazine (Japan), and Nozone Empire. He previously held a yearlong research affiliate position at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and currently teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the Rhode Island School of Design

David Reinfurt will be speaking at the Walker Art Center on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 as part of Avant la lettre: Insights 2009 Design Lecture Series.

Lectures:
March 24 Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam
March 31 Ellen Lupton, Baltimore

Series tickets: $70 ($48 AIGA/Walker members)
Individual event tickets: $20 ($15; $10 students)

For tickets: 612.375.7600 walkerart.org/tickets

Lectures will be webcast on channel.walkerart.org

Tuesday, March 10, 7 pm
Process Type Foundry, Minneapolis
Eric Olson and Nicole Dotin

1. What music were you into before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?

Eric Olson: Coalesce, MC5, Converge, Fabric, The Faces and John Adams.
Nicole Dotin: I think I’m still listening to it.

2. Who were your heroes before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?
Eric: I don’t have any heroes.
Nicole: I am inspired by the exceptional actions of others, but I don’t have any heroines.

3. What were your obsessions before becoming PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?
Eric: Fear I suppose. Mostly of speaking in public and driving through intersections.
Nicole: If I was obsessed with anything, it would have been perfection … and I still haven’t learned any better.

4. What were your dreams before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?

Eric: To become a type designer.
Nicole: To find what fit.

5. What were you reading before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?

Eric: Robin Kinross and Jonathan Franzen come to mind.

Nicole: A lot of American history at the time of the Revolution.

6. What did you use to collect before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?
Eric: I don’t collect.
Nicole: I’ve never had a collector’s mentality for objects, but I’ve always collected skills because I’ve always loved to learn.

7. What were you before PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?
Eric: A teacher, freelance graphic designer, office temp and construction laborer.
Nicole: A typography teacher, graphic designer, web designer and seamstress/tailor.

—-

Process Type Foundry has quickly become one of the most sought-after type foundries in the United States. Founded in 2002 by Eric Olson, the company is known for its unique contemporary typefaces, extensive extended character sets, and custom commissioned work. Its early font releases included the rounded sans serif Bryant, the quirky modular FIG Script, and Locator & Locator Display, a type family designed to represent the Twin Cities. Klavika, released in 2004, has become the foundry’s most popular typeface to date, appearing in everything from the Facebook logo to NBC’s on-air graphics and magazines such as Blender and Architecture MN. Process Type Foundry has worked with clients such as the New York Times Magazine, Thomson-Reuters, and Chevrolet to strengthen their identities with custom type work, and in 2005 Olson engineered the Walker Art Center’s new graphic identity. The studio’s work has been featured in the book Metro Letters and in numerous magazines, including Eye, Nylon, PRINT, étapes, HOW, STEP, Metropolis, Task Newsletter, and CAP&Design. Prior to forming Process, Olson taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) and was a design fellow at the University of Minnesota Design Institute and a graphic designer at the Walker. A principal in the company, Nicole Dotin received her MA in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, England, and previously taught at MCAD. In 2006 she joined Olson as the foundry’s second designer.

www.processtypefoundry.com

The Walker Art Center and AIGA Minnesota present Insights, which brings graphic designers from around the country and the world to the Twin Cities.

Series tickets: $70 ($48 AIGA/Walker members)
Individual event tickets: $20 ($15; $10 students)

Lectures:
March 10 Process Type Foundry, Minneapolis
March 17 David Reinfurt, New York
March 24 Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam
March 31 Ellen Lupton, Baltimore

Tickets: 612.375.7600 walkerart.org/tickets