Word: graphics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years had the Des Moines Register published anything that drew such passionate national response. For five days beginning in February, the Register (weekday circ. 210,000) ran meticulously detailed stories about a 29- year-old mother who had been abducted and raped. The series contained a graphic account of the assault and the woman's subsequent experience as a witness at her assailant's trial. To many Iowans, the most riveting fact about the series was that the victim chose to let the Register use her real name. By going public, said Nancy Ziegenmeyer, she hoped to focus attention...
...almost any survey of 20th century culture, World War II is a watershed: now, at the century's end, American graphic designers seem inordinately inspired by elegiac European modernists of the years before the war (early Soviets, Man Ray, Dadaists) and by the tantalizing, electric strangeness of postwar Japan. As in architecture, the revival of old styles creates some time-warp curiosities. In one of the display cases, designer Carin Goldberg's faux-1930s book jacket for a 1988 edition of Camus sits near books actually from the era -- and the new piece seems more evocative of the bygone...
...best, "Graphic Design in America" is like a dense, compelling Wurman guide, suggesting half-conscious connections between then and now, Europe and America, TV and print. Within a few minutes a visitor can see an 1864 American-flag campaign broadside, collections of Coke bottles through the years (the original was designed by Alexander Samuelson in 1915), a little bag that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for a San Francisco glass-and-china shop in 1942, the sweetly all-American Ritz cracker box, the computer-animated opening credits to the 1978 Superman movie and six pages from USA Today...
There is little self-conscious artiness on display. The exhibits mainly exemplify rare, happy confluences of art and commerce, from Deborah Sussman's chair advertisement for the Herman Miller company to Times Square's unplanned riot of electric signs. Graphic design is a populist art, this show declares. It derives its energy and value not from precious drawing-board perfection but from getting out and mixing it up in the rialto...
From campaign posters to Coke bottles, from movie credits to Mobil's flying horse, a rich, exhaustive show chronicles a century and a half of graphic arts...