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Exhibition design: Experience, Communication
[Okumura Akio and works]
@ddd gallery, Osaka Japan
January 18 – March 8, 2012

UMA/design farm designed an exhibition of graphic designer Mr.Akio Okumura. Contents is his 40 years work and ‘now-future’ work.

Exhibition was divided in four parts, Package / Poster / VI (logo animation and logo cards) / Mr. Akio Okumura’s studio (stay production).

Each part was separated by partitions that are 1,000 mm height. Visitors can feel Mr. Akio Okumura’s existence from anywhere in the room. And when they squat down, they can focus to appreciate his work.

Furthermore, visitor can order name card design and poster design to him. He will design in the exhibition studio, so they can experience his design process while talking with him.

photo: Yoshiro Masuda

This major international exhibition explores how graphic design has broadened its reach dramatically over the past decade, expanding from a specialized profession to a widely deployed tool. With the rise of user-generated content and new creative software, along with innovations in publishing and distribution systems, people outside the field are mobilizing the techniques and processes of design to create and publish visual media. At the same time, designers are becoming producers: authors, publishers, instigators, and entrepreneurs employing their creative skills as makers of content and shapers of experiences.

Featuring work produced since 2000 in the most vital sectors of communication design, Graphic Design: Now in Production explores design-driven magazines, newspapers, books, and posters as well as branding programs for corporations, subcultures, and nations. It also showcases a series of developments over the past decade, such as the entrepreneurial nature of designer-produced goods; the renaissance in digital typeface design; the storytelling potential of titling sequences for film and television; and the transformation of raw data into compelling information narratives.

Graphic Design: Now in Production is the largest museum exhibition on the subject since the Walker’s seminal 1989 exhibition Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History, and the Cooper-Hewitt’s 1996 comprehensive survey, Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture. Appropriately, this exhibition is co-organized by the two institutions. A comprehensive, illustrated catalogue produced by the Walker accompanies the exhibition.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
October 22, 2011 – January 22, 2012

December, 14, 2011 – February 4, 2012
Opening reception: Wednesday, December 14, 7-10pm

www.castillocorrales.fr

“NOTORIOUS (CHRISTIAN LEIGH)” is a Christmas Mystery in the form of an exhibition, a jigsaw puzzle which is not that simple to put together. The central character in the story is Christian Leigh, once a teenage American fashion designer prodigy in the early eighties, then a maverick exhibition curator who mesmerized the art world during a handful of years at the turn of the nineties, and today a self-proclaimed prolific (but extremely elusive) filmmaker, performance artist and book editor operating somewhere, somehow, in Europe.

Leigh has made a habit of burning bridges, of vanishing overnight, and of reinventing himself anew in a different milieu under a slightly modified name each time: the 13-year old designer who was profiled in People magazine in 1983 was known as Kristian; the curator who, in 1989, authored the bombastic exhibition “The Silent Baroque” that put Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac on the map, signed as Christian; whereas the filmmaker who managed to band together Béatrice Dalle, Guillaume Depardieu, Leos Carax, John Cale, Dinosaur Jr., Guillaume Dustan, and Dominique Reymond in “Process”, his first feature film released in 2003, goes by CS.

For each new life, for each new career, Leigh set no ceiling to his ambitions. But every time, it ended badly. Trails of unpaid bills, angry creditors, ripped-off artists, bamboozled collaborators, and perplexed actors are woven throughout Leigh’s biographies. And yet, this is not enough to explain why he disappears time and again. There’s clearly more to it than just being uncovered at some point as a con man, a pathological liar, a huckster, and having to be constantly on the run.

Something else is being articulated and enacted in this regular pattern of hard work leading to a disappearing act, although no one can say for sure what it is exactly. Most people who have been in touch with Leigh over all these years, and eventually been duped by him (btw, this includes us when, a couple of years ago, he came knocking at our door to shoot a scene for one of his films in our exhibition space), always remember Leigh also for his brilliant, erudite, untiring, infectious and entertaining personality, and finally don’t hold his broken promises against him that much. It is proof enough that, in spite of everything, there is something genuinely compelling in what it is he does, and how he does it.

The exhibition NOTORIOUS (CHRISTIAN LEIGH) at castillo/corrales assembles a documentation of Leigh’s years as one of the most inventive and original exhibition-makers of his time, the definitive curator-as-author. It also brings to light what happened next: a decade of extensive filming, writing, editing books and magazines, where film, art, fashion and politics collide in a highly idiosyncratic, far-reaching and opinionated way. Well… maybe, as in most cases, such films, books and projects only exist as announcements of things that are either to come, or are already past, no longer available, unverifiable, missing. NOTORIOUS is a portrait of a genius inventor of his self as an oeuvre, or vice versa. It is also a portrait of the art world seen by one astute observer and exploiter of the weaknesses, rifts and self-complacencies which are some of the wheels that make the art world spin like it does.

Opening at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs on Friday is the retrospective ‘Goudemalion’ of the work of defining 80s art director and photographer Jean-Paul Goude. A highlight of this season’s cultural programme, it will be the first ever retrospective of Goude’s work, now iconic on the French advertising and fashion scenes. Conceived as a giant installation retracing his 40 year career, there will be 6 special areas dedicated to his most influential projects: Toukie Smith, Les Galeries Lafayette, Grace Jones, cut-up slides, neon furniture and Chanel.

Fri 11 Nov-Sun 18 Mar. Tue-Sun, 11am-6pm (9pm, Thu).
Musée des Arts Décoratifs
107 rue de Rivoli, 1st.
M° Palais-Royal

Offprint Paris 10-13 Nov. 2011, is a platform dedicated to contemporary photography and image making. A meeting place for artists, photographers, graphic designers, curators, artistic directors a.o. Offprint Paris focuses on high-end and emerging practices, offering a unique selection of artists (photo) books, magazines, prints and zines.

For this second edition, a series of lectures, book signings and a workshop will take place during the fair.

House Industries and Herman Miller Japan announce a conceptually elegant collaboration that combines the classic Eames wire-base table with timeless typographic forms drawn from the House Industries Eames Century Modern font collection. Each tabletop is hand-printed in House’s Grand Rapids, Michigan factory, returned to Herman Miller for assembly then packaged in a special House Industries-designed wooden crate.

House Industries and Herman Miller are producing a limited edition series of 80 tables that include A thru Z, numbers and ornaments from House Industries Eames Century Modern font collection. Forty tables will be available at the Herman Miller Reach event on September 16, 2011 and 40 will be available at the House Industries exhibition at the Herman Miller Tokyo Showroom on October 27, 2011.

First Issue
Self-Publishing Book Fair
for Design and Art
14.–15. October 2011

No other branch predicts its own demise as often as the book industry. Yet despite the apodictic “book-is-dead” lament of many experts, countless new books are again being published this year. Now, parallel to the Frankfurt Book Fair, a new event is being launched. Self-publishing in design and art is the topic of this fair, organized under the general heading “Print Culture – Dead or Alive?!”. As the title implies, the event is going to be the first edition, followed by a Second and a Third Issue and many more in the future. This is a new start and a new idea, demonstrating that print is not at all dead, but rather in the process of reinventing itself right now. Producers – such as designers, authors or artists – finance, publish and distribute their own books, catalogues, magazines and collectibles themselves. Digital print and Internet make this possible. Books are part of their artistic production – are a personal form of expression.

basis Frankfurt e.V.
Gutleutstraße 8 – 12
60329 Frankfurt am Main
Germany

Stefan Sagmeister, Another exhibit about promotion and sales material
13 October–19 February 2011

The Austrian artist Stefan Sagmeister, who has lived in New York for the last seventeen years, is one of the most original graphic designers of his generation. Considering that there is no distinction between so-called “cultural” and commercial graphic design, he has worked for several of the great names in music (Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Rolling Stones), also executing numerous commissions for companies and institutions (Levi’s, BMW, Casa da Musica de Porto, etc.). For this exhibition, he has decided to focus on his commercial work over the last seven years. Divided into four sections, it focuses on the distinct typologies that Stefan Sagmeister distinguishes in his work: Selling culture, Selling corporations, Selling friends, Selling myself. The exhibition design by Big Game highlights the breadth of his graphic language, characterised by his subtle combination of the applied and fine arts: technology, intimist drawings and gigantic installations illustrate his disc jackets, commercial catalogues, exhibition catalogues, posters, visual identities, logos, etc.

107, rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris
www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr

Opening hours
Every day except Monday, 11 AM – 6 PM
Late night on Thursday until 9 PM

Admission fee
Full rate €9.00 — Concessions €7,50

SCION presents
A PRODUCT OF DESIGN
Curated by Gluekit
RSVP For Opening Reception at scion.com/​space

Showcasing designers whose passion projects have taken shape in an array of products, this exhibition spotlights the blurred line between collectibility and function. A Product of Design celebrates a cross-section of companies and individuals whose work is graphic and inspiring.

Opening Night: Saturday, September 17, 2011, 7-10pm
Show dates: September 17 – October 8, 2011
RSVP For Opening Reception at scion.com/​space

The exhibition features:
The Solitary Arts / Andy Mueller + The Quiet Life / Peter Buchanan-Smith + Best Made Company / Colophon Foundry / Various Projects / Hugo & Marie / Booji / Ben Blanc Studio / JB Lab

Scion Installation L.A.
3521 Helms Ave. (at National)
Culver City, CA 90232

(25 August — 1 October 2011)

Kemistry Gallery and Fletcher Studio are proud to present Mind Over Matter: Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways – a celebration of ten years of this seminal publication and the work of a true design icon.

The exhibition brings together a collection of original material and notes from Alan Fletcher’s archive, documenting thirty or so years of attentive curiosity by Alan at large – throughout a career that (he asserted) was made from being in the right place at the right time. The accumulation of coincidence, chance and choice, that eventually led Alan to make the book, will pique curiosity and enlighten minds. A truly unique and personal collection of visual imagery, design articles, factual and cultural curiosities and quotations, The Art of Looking Sideways captures the sensory overload of contemporary visual culture, while also acting as a primer in visual intelligence. Fletcher’s work is instantly recognisable for its effortless simplicity, visual wit, and an inherent joy and surprise that was intensely personal. A compulsion for collecting useless information and putting it to work combined with a mastery of book design, shaped his thoughts and fed the fire.

Fletcher reminds us that a strong idea is always at the heart of a great design and that one must constantly reconsider the relationship between thinking and looking, telling and showing. His work, as reflected in this exhibition, is as refreshing and inspiring today as ever.

Alan Fletcher belongs to that élite international group of designers who have transcended the conventional boundaries of their craft. He was a member of the now legendary design consultancy Fletcher Forbes Gill, and a founding partner of the international design group Pentagram. Whilst as Consultant Art Director at Phaidon, he not only set high design standards for its art, architecture and design books, but worked with a generation of younger designers as well as to tell his design story by publishing his own books.

Kemistry Gallery, together with the estate of Alan Fletcher, have made available two beautiful, limited edition giclée prints – A Pizza and Two’s a crowd, three’s company. Exhibition posters and copies of the book The Art of Looking Sideways , published by Phaidon, will also be available for purchase during the exhibition.