Archive for the ‘academia’ Category

history and influence: confronting the gendered gaze

On May 3, 2013 / academia, photography / Leave a comment

As the modern era gave way to the postmodern, issues of gender and representation came to the forefront in Western photographic art. The medium of photography was uniquely suited to address postmodern aesthetic and conceptual concerns and became a primary tool for artists to subvert existing norms of gender representation within art and society. Artists working within this genre helped to redefine how we view art photography and what role gender and sexuality plays in visual representation. Although artists like Claude Cahun in the early 1900s helped pave the way for later feminist challenges, radical shifts in how women sought to visually represent themselves began to emerge in the 1970s. These shifts were inspired in large part by Laura Mulvey’s 1975 critical essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” This pivotal text in feminist theory utilized psychoanalytic concepts to present what Mulvey viewed as pressing concerns for feminists in cinema: principally,

history and influence: modernism in 20th-century America

On May 8, 2012 / academia / Leave a comment

The American modernist movement of the early- to mid-20th century was as complex as it was dynamic. In part a reaction to the European avant-garde, and in part an attempt to establish a uniquely American aesthetic, modernism in America encompassed a wide array of subjects, styles, and philosophies. In discussing American modernism, one is immediately confronted with the difficulty of defining it. American modernists shared with their European counterparts an interest in machines, urbanity, and an embrace of new technology (1). But American modernism, while undoubtedly influenced by the European avant-garde, simultaneously rejected their ideologies. American artists were committed to defining what they saw as a uniquely American form of modernism, separate from that of Europe. In fact, this search for artistic identity could be called “the primary cultural and critical issue of the Post-World War I era” (2). Perhaps one of the best ways to understand American modernism is

history and influence: the art of war in the 1910s

On December 5, 2011 / academia, graphic design / 4 Comments

The poster holds an unassuming yet highly impactful place in the history of art and design. Created as public display ephemera for a variety of purposes – from product advertising to political campaigning – posters have long provided an economical and visually powerful mode of public communication. Although poster design was already somewhat recognized within the art world of the early 1900s, its importance as a political tool was established by the ubiquitous government-sponsored poster art of the two World Wars. These posters, both in America and abroad, served a unique and challenging purpose, to “make coherent and acceptable a basically incoherent and irrational ordeal of killing, suffering and destruction that violates every accepted principle of morality and decent living” (1). To do this successfully required refined artistic skill and ingenuity from a broad range of artists. War posters of all countries and eras are remarkably similar in their foundations,

history and influence: WPA poster campaign

On October 25, 2011 / academia, graphic design / Leave a comment

The 1930s and 1940s have been referred to as “a golden age of graphic art in the service of society.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the expansive collection of posters commissioned by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) under the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (5) These posters were in many ways unlikely candidates for noteworthy design. Created primarily to provide work for unemployed artists, many feared government sponsorship of art would stifle creativity. Furthermore, American design lacked a unified style at the time, instead borrowing aesthetics from European movements. However, what emerged from the WPA poster division was both creative and innovative, producing a body of poster art described at the time as “more vital than any this country has ever known.” (2,9) The Federal Art Project + the Poster Division The WPA was the largest agency in Roosevelt’s New Deal, and it put unemployed artists to work

history and influence: London Underground

On October 19, 2011 / academia, graphic design / 7 Comments

There are few, if any, single bodies of work as influential in early 20th century graphic design as the work produced for the London Underground. Ranging from typeface to posters to maps, the London Underground graphics of the 1910s through 1930s both exemplified the aesthetics of modernist movements and helped to shape the future of information design and typography. When Steven Heller asked philosopher Edward Tenner what he considered the most significant graphic design of the past century, Tenner responded, “For lasting and positive influence, I doubt anything beats the London Transport’s ensemble of structures, signs, posters, publications, and maps… It reflected an ideal of ultrarational, benignly hegemonic public authority… The basics of the design have remained, but the system has not kept up, even if its great heritage has been largely preserved” (1). The Tube Map Perhaps the most iconic and famous single design piece from the London Underground

Archive for the ‘academia’ Category

history and influence: confronting the gendered gaze

history and influence: modernism in 20th-century America

history and influence: the art of war in the 1910s

history and influence: WPA poster campaign

history and influence: London Underground

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