Designing with Collage for the Arts
A number of recent calls on design projects prodded me to expand the site’s design portfolio. In the process, I was reminded of how my collage work has informed my design work. Collage has been a particularly useful design strategy for group exhibitions, where the design must suggest multitudes and the politics of emphasizing one artist over another can lead to difficulties.
The first time I really played with this possibility predated my working digitally, when I was art directing and designing the Venetian glass arts exhibition catalog for Muriel Karasik Gallery. Noticing connections of color and form, I brazenly took the print proofs of the talented photographer George Erml, and literally ripped them and glued them down. A smaller collage was printed on the back cover.
Of course the capacity to work digitally has made everything much easier, never mind being able to toy with type colors to enhance title legibility! For the Everson Museum’s Ceramic National catalog front cover, I chose two images that contrasted strongly in technique and surface to imply the range of work in the show. On the back these suggestive glimpses of partial pieces continued. This catalog was jointly designed with fine designer Laurie Ann Cronin.
For another group show at the Everson Museum I was thrilled when one artist dropped out, only because it left nine, enabling me to lay the artists out 3 by 3. Much of the fun lies in looking for the subtle segue or sharp transition from one piece to the next.
Collage can also be an apt solution for something as simple as a postcard. This oversized card was designed for Hamilton College’s Emerson gallery. The break in the weight of the font symbolizes the difference in experience from teacher to student, since the show featured the work of the art professors and their former students, now-professional artists.
For a recent gallery guide for the Emerson Gallery there was an eccentric array of exhibitions with the loose theme of religion. Finding the unifying yet contrasting color palette and arranging several images into a combined whole helped to strengthen the overall communication for this exhibition.
One last example must be mentioned: for an exhibit at the Munson Williams Arts Institute, how could I not make a collage for a walltext for an exhibit about Dadaism? That show gave rare license to use not only a mix of backgrounds and embedded imagery, but the paragraphs and fonts themselves were collaged.
