Graphic Design: Now in Production

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
October 22, 2011–January 22, 2012

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Governor's Island, NY
June 1 – September 3, 2012

Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA
September 30, 2012 – January 6, 2013

Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC
October 2013 – January 2014

RISD Art Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
March 28–August 3, 2014

Graphic Design: Now In Production (2011) was co-curated with Ellen Lupton of the Cooper-Hewitt museum with a team of guest curators with expertise in some of the exhibition's thematic areas, such as film titles (Ian Albinson) branding (Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio), and magazines (Jeremy Leslie). Picking up where the design authorship debates of the 1990s left off, this exhibition explored the evolution of graphic design in an expanded field of practice. With nearly 500 examples drawn from a multitude of practices of graphic design that range from entrepreneurial ventures in product development to experiments in self-publishing that fuse research, writing, editing, designing, and publishing.

Visitors queue to use Jurg Lehni and Alex Rich's Empty Words, a poster making device that utilizes a vinyl cutter and typesetting screen interface. Other works on view include commissioned works from Experimental Jetset and Daniel Eatock.

LUST's Posterwall for the 21st Century uses an algorithm to design a poster based on either a visitor's Tweet or by scraping data—texts and images—from local news websites. Posters respond to visitor's movements—moving forward and enlarging—through the use of tracking sensors.

Featuring more than 250 contemporary designers and illustrated with more than 1,400 images, this ambitious catalog surveys a postmillennial universe of graphic design's expanded practice. Design for the exhibition catalogue in collaboration with Emmet Byrne. Editorial and curation in collaboration with Ellen Lupton.