Collateral Matters opens this week.
Brace yourself for blatant self-promotion:
This week marks the opening of Collateral Matters: Selections form the Museum of Contemporary Craft Archives with Kate Bingaman-Burt and Clifton Burt.
Using printed materials and ephemera from the Museum archive, the exhibition reveals stories about the history of printing and design in Portland, and communicates how such printed materials construct institutional identity.
Focusing primarily on the 1940s through the 1970s, the collateral materials on view provide a simple study of both intentionally and unintentionally designed pieces in the pre-desktop publishing era. The critical role of printshops is revealed through designed print pieces, such as invitations, posters and letterhead, and then contrasted alongside office paperwork – handwritten artist statements, pastel-toned invoices and receipts speckled with red “sale” dots, for example. In an installation designed to show the visual impact of printed materials, the guest curators engage typography from the mundane to the meticulously designed, showing how graphic language functions in a range of types of printed collateral.
Since the spring, my wife Kate and I have been sifting through thousands of materials in the Museum’s files. From those we pulled a few hundred pieces that stood out from the rest. In many cases, a selected piece might have perfectly encapsulated the design-thinking of its day. In other cases, a piece might have been carefully hand-written notes showcasing the lost art of penmanship. But most exiting has been witnessing how organizations’ logos and visual identities evolved through the decades; notable in these archives were MoMA, Cranbrook, local Portland businesses, and of course the Museum of Contemporary Craft’s own identity shifts —including its name.
Viewing so many of the exhibition materials in the same room with the ephemera of bringing those exhibitions to life is like hearing the meetings, conversations, and ideas of the organization played back for us. It provides a window not only into the collective memory of the MoCC but into how things got done before the advent of email, mobile phones, and the internet.
Collateral Matters teaser from Clifton Burt on Vimeo.
The Collateral Matters exhibition begins opens on August 26th and runs through January 11. I hope that you’ll stop into the museum and see it, participate in some of the show’s programming, or enjoy its material online.
Collateral Matters: Selections by Kate Bingaman-Burt and Clifton Burt — Museum of Contemporary Craft
One Comment
I want to thank you for putting a show of this importantance together. IT makes those of us who were BC…before computer, stand with pride as we came to the industry when it was considered a craft.
MY husband and I came to design for our love of type.
Kudos for showing its history as we feel even though so much has been lost in the fast world of computers…cream does rise to the top and those who still care about crafting a beautiful printed piece always stands out.
Red and Mark
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[...] a carefully curated selection of printed ephemera that is up at the museum until January 8 (see Collateral Matters in Print Matters, Bangback, August 24, [...]