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.
