perpetual beta

The VCFA MFA in Graphic Design Program Blog

Migration, Poetry, Typography and Blues

January 30, 2015

The Modern Museum of Art and The Phillips Collection Exhibition Catalog, Jacob Lawrence: Migration Series designed by Faculty member Silas Munro.

Poly-mode, the design studio of Founding Faculty member and Faculty Co-Chair, Silas Munro designed a exhibition catalog with Brian Johnson for the upcoming One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Works opening at the Modern Museum of Art on April 3.

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence was an innovative young painter at the ripe-young age of 23, living in Harlem when he completed his masterpiece The Migration Series. The 60-panel series of tempera paintings depicts the movement of African-American people from the South to the North.

Title Page

Title Page

Section Opener

Section Opener

Leah Dickerman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture was looking for an African American designer with a experience with social activism. Amanda Washburn, senior designer at MoMa and Lorraine Wild, AIGA gold-medalist both suggested Dickerman look to the work of Silas Munro, because of his experience in book design and his tenure as Design Director of Housing Works—New York’s preeminent advocacy organization for people living with HIV and homelessness.

A key aspect of Lawrence’s body of work is the rich fabric of social activism that he and his work lived in and responded to. Making the ideal designer one who could bring a typographic language that gave sensitivity to The Series’ power of graphic form and celebrating it’s poetic, polemic titles.

 

Essay Section

Essay Section

The scholarly essays by Dickerman and Elsa Smithgall, Curator at The Phillips Collection feature extensive illustrations that are set to a flexible, syncopated rhythm across a grid that fuses classical, modern and modular structures. In short, the essays visual form articulates the story of the social and art historical context of Lawrence’s The Migration Series in a form of jazz: the blues.

Plate Section

Plate Section

Plate section

Plate section

At the book’s end is a coda to the two scholarly essays by Dickerman and Smithgall and plates of the 60 works by Lawrence with notes by Jodi Roberts. It comes in the form of The Migration Poetry Suite, curated and edited by Elizabeth Alexander. The Suite features new poems by an extremely lauded cast of poets of color: Yusef Komunyakaa, Crystal Williams, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Terrance Hayes, Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, Patricia Spears Jones, and Kevin Young. This section required it’s own sub-grid that formed a book within a book, with it’s own flood of color, and typographic logic that would be flexible enough for poems that ranged from 3 lines to 3 pages—from versed to concrete forms.

Poetry Section

Poetry Section

 

Poetry Section

Poetry Section

The culmination of the catalog shows that a sympathetic container of type and image expressed in a systematic way can knit together and make whole elements as diverse as visual art, poetry, art history, cultural critique, and social justice.trace affiliate link | Nike Shoes