The all-American spirit of midcentury modernism, in three US State Department-sponsored exhibitions This revelatory volume recovers and presents the history of three exhibitions organized by the US State Department's Traveling Exhibition Service almost 70 years ago: Contemporary American Textiles, curated by Florence Knoll, Contemporary American Wallpapers, curated by Tom Lee, and Containers & Packaging, curated by Will Burtin. These exhibitions were made for presentation in West German schools, museums and trade fairs, and through the Amerika Haus program. By joining consumer choice with political choice, the State Department tried to convince West Germans and other Europeans that the United States, its system of government and its capitalist values offered more and better lifestyle choices than those of the Soviet bloc. This book is both an exhibition catalog and a reader. It restores the spirit of these three exhibitions to the public memory and challenges the idea that design has little political purpose. By piecing together primary sources found within archival collections, libraries and special collections, the book reveals how the State Department deliberately employed design, a process that binds people to daily life, to embody a connection between a rhetoric of political freedom and capitalist values of consumer freedom. Considering these exhibitions and their showcased objects, characteristically associated with midcentury modernism, A Designed Lifesuggests that, even now, the Cold War affects our lives, habits and culture. Designers and curators include: Anni Albers, Evelyn Anselevicius, Richard Lee Brecker, Will Burtin, Serge Chermayeff, Morton and Millie Goldsholl, Elizabeth Gordon, Eszter Haraszty, Peter Harnden, Ilonka Karasz, Katzenbach and Warren Inc., Juliet Kepes, Florence Knoll, Walter Landor, Laverne Originals, Tom Lee, Dorothy Liebes, Raymond Loewy, Jack Masey, George Nelson, Walter Paepcke, Annemarie Henle Pope, Noémi Raymond, Bernard Rudofsky, Herwin Schaefer, Saul Steinberg, Angelo Testa and the Tilletts.

A Designed Life: Contemporary American Textiles, Wallpapers and Containers & Packaging, 1951–54

Arts & Photography

Decorative Arts & Design

Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC

On artist Rosy Keyser's dynamic and sculptural paintingsThis book surveys the paintings of New York-based artist Rosy Keyser (b. 1974), which are constructed from such ordinary materials as linen, canvas, aluminum, paint, gravel and sawdust, evoking the raw energy of action painting and Art Brut.

Rosy Keyser: Distal's Musk

Individual Artists

The origami-and-lace-inspired practice of a longtime MICA professor and fiber artist Dutch artist Annet Couwenberg (born 1950) makes textiles and sculptural objects inspired by Elizabethan collars using lace as a primary material. This is Couwenberg's first major English-language monograph and presents a wide range of her projects from the past decade.

Annet Couwenberg: Sewing Circles

Oletha DeVane: Spectrum of Light and Spirit

History & Criticism

Ciphers of Identity includes work by Thomas Allen Harris, Barbara Kruger, Elaine Reichek, Yvonne Rainer and Mark Rappaport. Maurice Berger's careful essay explores the politically charged climate of America in the 1990s.

Ciphers Of Identity

This book traces the evolution of the style and thinking of Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper and Yvonne Rainer--five artists who explore the complex relationship between form, theatricality and ideology. Minimal Politics demonstrates how their work evolved from a more minimal, formal aesthetic in the 1960s to a more overtly ideological perspective.

Minimal Politics: Performativity and Minimalism in Recent American Art (Issues in Cultural Theory)

Maurice Berger

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

This book features the first American retrospective look at the Italian Swiss graphic designer and typographer Bruno Monguzzi, who has worked internationally since the 1960s. In addition to his award winning typographic design he designed nine pavillions for Expo '67 in Montreal. Monguzzi has also lectured extensively and is a member of the prestigious Alliance Graphique Internationale. Essayist Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo -- whose own design work has been recognized by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the American Center for Design, ID Magazine, Communication Arts Magazine, and the American Association of Museums -- describes in detail Monguzzi's contributions to European design. The book also features images, interviews, biographical information, and appreciations by fellow designers, including Gone Federico, Rudolph deHarak, April Greiman, Ikko Tanaka, and Antonio Boggeri.

Bruno Monguzzi: A Designer's Perspective: Issues in Cultural Theory 2

We know Paul Rand through the stunning advertising, editorial, publishing, institutional, identity, corporate and intellectual legacy he left behind. A major figure at the epicenter of twentieth-century design, his impact on modern communication practice and theory was unparalleled. For him, Modernism was a way of life and a form of belief, not a style. Like his European colleagues, he understood Modernism's tenets as a something that could be employed to better human experience in the modern world. Whether he was designing for the American Broadcasting Company, IBM Corporation or United Parcel Service, or teaching at Cooper Union or Pratt Institute, Rand gave life to his art, definition to graphic design and a reputation for quality to a discipline that needed it. His was an early voice in proposing the essence of Modernist theories in visual communication, and he was both ruthlessly pragmatic and startlingly visionary. His passion for his subject and his understanding of the theories and realities of perception and communication were immense, and he was often able to illuminate for the layperson the complexities and accomplishments of his triumphant art. Rand's contemporaries, students and friends knew him as a man even more extraordinarily cultivated and diverse in his talents and interests. Here their diversity of voices combine to give a vivid, personal and uniquely informative introduction to Rand and his achievements. A compendium of essays, interviews, photographic reproductions, a contextual timeline and an extensive bibliography, Paul Rand: Modernist Design adds to the growing literature on Rand, helping to place him in the proper context within a century of innovative art, design, architecture and technology.

Paul Rand: Modernist Design

HELLER, Steven

Birdsall, Derek

Garland, Nathan

Graphic Design

Over the past 20 years, the cultural and scholarly discourse around race has exploded to include the study of whiteness and white privilege, representing a radical shift in the way we think and talk about race in the United States. Since the advent of the modern civil rights movement, people of color have usually been responsible for leading the debate and discussion about race and racism, forced to evaluate the status of their race in relation to the prejudice they experience every day--while most white people, even the most liberal, are usually oblivious to the psychological and political weight of their own color. The study of whiteness asks all Americans--and especially white people--to take stock of the political, psychological, economic and cultural implication of white skin, white entitlement and white privilege. White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art, the first exhibition and book devoted to the subject, gives voice to 11 artists who explicitly address the issue of whiteness: Max Becher and Andrea Robbin, Nayland Blake, Nancy Burson, Wendy Ewald and Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Barbara Kruger, Nikki S. Lee, Cindy Sherman and Gary Simmons. David R. Roediger, Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Minnesota, contributes an essay on whiteness in the culture at large, and Patricia J. Williams, Professor of Law at Columbia University, writes about the social and legal implications of whiteness. Curator Maurice Berger, author of White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness, provides an introductory text on whiteness and art as well as individual artist essays.

White: Whiteness And Race In Contemporary Art (Issues in Cultural Theory)

Williams, Patricia

Roediger, David

As technology has burgeoned in recent years, so have ghosts in the machine, or so the 29 artists featured here suggest. All use existing gadgets--photography, film, video, radio, Internet, and digital media--to explore age-old questions about parallel worlds and the paranormal. Photography has a long history with this topic--from the infamous Cottingham fairy photographs through studio spiritualist images to more recent grainy snapshots of Sasquatch and unexplained flying objects, it is often called upon by viewers to testify, and used by artists to move between science, fantasy and art. In days of millenial angst, ever-greater leaps of science, and ever-decreasing wilderness, other worlds seem as possible, probable, alluring, and potentially within reach of new technologies as they did in the days of fairies. Among the artists whose observations are recorded here are Jeremy Blake, Gregory Crewdson and Mariko Mori.

Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal

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Books by Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC