Off Center

• Potty Art again: The New York Times’ City Room blog takes a seat and looks at some art museum toilets by way of The Art Museum Toilet of Museum Art. The name is a mouthful and I think the joke is on us. The Walker isn’t part of the museum, but our restrooms are rated highly and named lovingly.
• 2010 Whitney Biennial curators named: Francesco Bonami will be the curator, working with the Whitney’s Gary Carrion-Murayari as associate curator. Bonami curated Unfinished History in 1998 and was an contributing curator on Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972 in 2001, both at the Walker.
• Money and Art: Giant Robot is making money from art, having a print sale. Included in the Giant Robot print sale is the work of Mike Perry, has been mentioned on this blog before, resulting in some, uhh, interesting search terms. Mike’s latest book, Over & Over, full of hand-drawn patterns is excellent. Rirkrit Tiravanija is making art on money.  Rirkrit created untitled, better known as the stage, in 2006’s Open Ended exhibition and has several works in the Walker’s collection. [via]
• Two things beautiful: Manhole art from the streets of Japan and Miquel Barceló’s ceiling installation at the UN’s palace of nations in Geneva.

What is it with Minneapolis and hand-drawn typography? Something in the water?

The new book Hand Job: A Catalog of Type by Mike Perry (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), is a fascinating 250-page tome in its own right, with clever, cute and sometimes bizarre examples of custom-penned letterforms by the likes of Kate “Obsessive Consumption” Bingaman and design great Stefan Sagmeister.

But it also features a slew of artists and designers with local ties, including former Walker designers Andy Beach (onetime Off Center guest blogger who’s now an independent designer after working for years at Urban Outfitters) and Kindra Murphy (an associate professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). Murphy’s samples include sketches for promotional materials she designed for Walker family programs.

It also showcases the work of MCAD grads, including Adam Garcia (who I last saw at First Amendment Arts‘ show with six-year-old Cohen Morano), Emily C.M. Anderson, J. Zachary Keenan, Jeff Lai, Sparky Hardisty, Patrick Miller, Travis “Mint Condition” Stearns, and Sam Sherman. Even the non-hand-drawn typefaces in the book have Walker connections: Eric Olson of Minneapolis-based Process Type Foundry created Bryant, one of the fonts the book’s body text is set in. A U of M grad and former Walker designer, he helped create the Walker’s identity system.

So is Minneapolis a mecca of hand-drawn type? Is there a cabal of custom typemakers here, a hand-job underground railroad? Both, says author Mike Perry. He went to MCAD, studied under Kindra Murphy there, is friends with Olson, and tried, unsuccessfully, to get a Walker design job — which put him in touch with other designers.

“I applied for the Walker internship and [design director] Andrew Blauvelt wrote in my rejection letter that I should get in contact with Andy [Beach] at Urban,” he wrote in an email. “So I did and six months later I got hired at Urban Outfitters where I got to know Andy and Erin [Mulcahy, Beach's wife and a former Walker design fellow]. I worked at Urban for 3 years.”

Artwork: Typography by Paul Clark (top), Andy Beach, Dan Funderburgh (middle), sketches by Kindra Murphy (below)