At the Cranbrook Art Museum’s new exhibition (June 16 – October 7) “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986,” punk rock’s visual lexicon comes into focus. The retrospective exhibit is the largest of its kind and includes displays featuring posters, zines and everything in between from the massive collection of Andrew Krivine, who has assembled a major worldwide hoard of documentary treasures. The curator, Andrew Blauvelt, has done a masterful exhibit and catalog. In the broadsheet newspaper-format catalog for the show Blauvelt writes:Photo by Debra HolmesAs a student and a practitioner of graphic design during the punk era (and a fan of the music), I knew from firsthand experience how the movement left an indelible impression on the field and vice versa. Reflecting on this moment some forty years later, it became much clearer how punk’s transgressive spirit upended the seemingly dogmatic rules of how graphic design should look ...
Tagged: Andrew Blauvelt, Graphic Design, punk
Read MoreBY EMMA KLUG Galleries will feature DIY-style posters, zines, and album coversPHOTO COURTESY THE GALLERIES AT MOORE, PHILADELPHIA. PHOTO BY JOSEPH HU.Following a series of exhibitions that focused on street art, Cranbrook Art Museum is now attempting to explore the cultural impact of punk and post-punk through its new exhibits Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 and Shepard Fairey: Salad Days, 1989-1999. Paying homage to the art forms and artists that helped visually define the movement, Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die features appropriated or borrowed images, collage and montage work, as well as DIY zines and flyers. The exhibit will also take a look at how comics, the horror genre, and modern art influenced the creation of punk graphics. “Since its rebellious inception in the 1970s, punk has always exhibited very visual forms of expression,” says the Cranbrook Art Museum Director, Andrew Blauvelt, who curated the exhibitions. “The energy of ...
Tagged: Graphic Design, punk, Shepard Fairey
Read MoreBy Lee DeVitoAs Cranbrook Art Museum director Andrew Blauvelt points out, the Latin root of the word "amatuer" is "love" — and that's the spirit behind two upcoming shows at the museum, which delve into the visual world of punk rock ethos. "If you're a graphic designer or nerd like I am, you'll understand punk, because it was based on amateurism, which I'm saying in a positive way," he says. That passion — raw, unbridled — is on full display at the museum. Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 takes an early look at how the nascent musical genre presented itself, through record sleeves, fliers, posters, clothing, and more.Blauvelt points out that what we now call "culture jamming," or manipulating corporate art, was popularized by Sex Pistols designer Jamie Reid, who in turn was inspired by the Situationists in Europe. "It comes out during this time that they ...
Tagged: Graphic Design, punk
Read MoreBy Joseph Szczesny, For Digital First Media Punk music has made loud waves ever since the 1970s. But the punk sensibility also caught on with visual artists, who used a variety of media to stretch the philosophy of punk beyond music into different corners of popular culture, says Andrew Blauvelt, the director of the Cranbrook Art Museum and the curator of the new show making its debut at the museum with a preview party Friday, June 15. It opens to the public Saturday, June 16.Andrew Blauvelt, director of the Cranbrook Art Museum and curator of the new show “Too Fast to Live. Too Young To Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 and Shepard Fairey. Salad Days, 1989-1999” debuting at the museum June 15 & 16, 2018. Photo by Joseph Szczesny/Digital First MediaThe exhibition, “Too Fast to Live. Too Young To Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986 and Shepard Fairey. Salad Days, 1989-1999” is actually two shows ...
Tagged: Graphic Design, punk
Read MoreBY KELSEY CAMPBELL-DOLLAGHANImage: PD Rearick/courtesy Cranbrook MuseumPunk, and its associated subcultures, revolutionized design practice. A slew of new shows and books reckons with its impact. Do you remember the first zine someone put in your hands? If you lived through punk’s heydey, or any of the subcultures that reverberated down from its birth to echo into the mid-aughts, you probably came across more than a few of them. Variable in quality, self-printed, gratuitously niche, and often full of self-referential winks, zine culture existed at a precise moment when computers were becoming more common, but social networks hadn’t yet made the notion of communicating with your peers on paper irrelevant. They mixed DIY culture and nascent technology with music and art. You sent away for them, hoarded them, and published your own responses, even if you were a high schooler imagining a culture thousands of miles–and probably a decade or two–away from your ...
Tagged: Graphic Design, punk
Read MoreIn 1970, shortly after graduating from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Stephen Frykholm joined Herman Miller as its first in-house graphic designer. The modern furniture company was established in 1923 by D.J. De Pree in Zeeland, Michigan, and has manufactured the designs of Cranbrook students and faculty, including Charles and Ray Eames and Eric Chan. Over the course of his forty-some year tenure at Herman Miller, Frykholm helped shape the visual identity of the iconic American company. In 2010, he received the AIGA Medal for excellence in graphic design, the field’s highest honor. Among Frykholm’s first assignments at Herman Miller was a poster for the company’s annual summer picnic. For this quick assignment Frykholm turned to screen printing, a simple process that he learned while working for the Peace Corps in Aba, Nigeria, at a government trade school. All fifty copies of Frykholm’s 1970 poster were screen-printed in a basement over ...
Tagged: Graphic Design, Herman Miller, poster
Read MoreSteve Frykholm, Herman Miller Summer Picnic August 21, 1970, silkscreen with lacquer finish. Image courtesy of the artist.BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich., June 19 , 2015 – Cranbrook Art Museum is pleased to announce that the exhibition Designing Summer: Objects of Escape will open on June 20, 2015. The exhibition examines how summertime is embodied through objects of the past and present in Michigan. It will run through August 30, 2015. An exclusive ArtMembers’ reception will celebrate the opening tonight, June 19, from 6-8pm, the same evening as Nick Cave: Here Hear debuts. Memberships will be available for purchase at the door that evening. Designing Summer: Objects of Escape follows the history of people enjoying the summer months in Michigan for the past 70 years. Exclusively featuring works by Michigan designers and makers, the exhibition begins in the mid-century, at a time when a thriving automobile industry and growing middle class led to a ...
Tagged: Graphic Design, Michigan, Product Design, Shelley Selim
Read MoreWow, has it been a month since the last post? Apologies for the radio silence over here--we are closing in on the final weeks before the opening of our summer exhibitions (June 20th for members, June 21 for the public!) and all of the troops have been rallying to perfect install and content before our guests arrive! I had to return to the blog today to pay tribute to Massimo Vignelli, who passed away in New York yesterday at the age of 83. Vignelli was a design visionary, executing some of the most iconic graphic programs of the 1960s and 1970s, and renowned especially for promulgating the International Typographic Style through his many designs for advertising, corporate identity, and packaging. With his company Unimark, and later Vignelli Associates, he launched graphic identity systems for Knoll (1967), American Airlines (1967), and the New York City Transit Authority (1970), as well as the ...
Tagged: Dot Zero, Graphic Design, Massimo Vignelli, Shelley Selim
Read MoreWe're big vinyl connoisseurs here at the Art Museum. One of us collects albums with covers featuring mid-century furniture (like this one!). Another spent a weekend scouring every record store in Stockholm for a Swedish pressing of Lee Hazlewood's Cowboy in Sweden, to no avail. So it's no surprise that we are pretty pumped for Record Store Day tomorrow, an annual nationwide event--held on the third Saturday of April--for which record stores feature limited edition pressings and exclusive releases from hundreds of musicians, new and old. Record collecting has experienced a surge in recent years, particularly for my generation. If we want to get diagnostic, it all could be chalked up to a cultural response to the immateriality of music (and more broadly, our lives in general); a longing for the days past when music--in its vinyl manifestation--was tangible, permanent, and thus held more personal value. But there's also that big, ...
Tagged: Album Art, Andy Warhol, Ben Shahn, Graphic Design, Painting, Shelley Selim
Read MoreJohn Cage Listens to John Cage, 1974. Offset lithograph poster designed by Michael McCoy, with photography by Frances Greenberg. Printed at Cranbrook Press. (c) Michael McCoy. Photo courtesy Stephen Milanowski.In early April of 1974, artist-composer John Cage traveled to Cranbrook to celebrate the opening of Music–Mushrooms–Manuscripts at the Art Museum, an exhibition of his drawings, photographs, books, poems, prints, and sound recordings. Featured works included his 1969 series of Plexigrams, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, and the Mushroom Book, both printed by Irwin Hollander (1973-1975 head of the Cranbrook Academy of Art Printmaking department). On the evening of April 12, Cage attended a concert of his own music—aptly titled “John Cage Listens to John Cage”—performed by local musicians as well as students from the Cranbrook Upper School and neighboring Andover and Seaholm high schools. The program featured a 35-piece ensemble of brass, string, woodwind, and non-pitched percussion instruments for ...
Tagged: Chuck Baughman, Doug Huston, Graphic Design, John Cage, Michael McCoy, Prints, Shelley Selim, Stephen Milanowski, Steve Tennent
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