The Masters Series: April Greiman
October 20 - December 13, 2008
Reception: Monday, October 20, 6-8pm
Lecture: Tuesday, October 21, 7pm
“a prophet, a teacher, a hotelier, an environmental artist, a businesswoman, a technophile and a technophobe” - Lewis Blackwell, from Something from Nothing
School of Visual Arts (SVA) will honor April Greiman
with the Masters Series Award and retrospective exhibition. One of the
first American designers to embrace digital technologies, Greiman has
explored the intersection of art, design and architecture for more than
a quarter century. Born and raised in New York, she now heads the Los
Angeles design consultancy Made in Space. "April Greiman: Does It Make
Sense?" will be on view from October 20 through December 13, 2008, at
the Visual Arts Museum.
“April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital,” says Steven Heller,
design historian and co-chair of the MFA Design Department at SVA. “She
is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that
defined late twentieth-century graphic design.”
April Greiman’s
unique contribution to visual culture is evident in the breadth of her
portfolio, with commissions ranging from a US postage stamp
commemorating the Nineteenth Amendment (which extended the vote to
women) to an LED installation for the 31-story Accenture Tower in
Minneapolis. These works will be represented in the exhibition at SVA
alongside a selection of groundbreaking posters, identity systems and
recent experimental videos and digital photographs. Long interested in
the built environment, Greiman has frequently collaborated with
architects, among them Frank Gehry and Michael Rotondi of RoTo
Architects. For this retrospective, she has sought guidance from the
“gravity consultants” at RoTo Architects and B+U, a Los Angeles
architecture firm whose work is informed by mapping and transforming
imperceptible forces, including sonograms, sounds and magnetism.
Greiman
is renowned for her experiments with the Apple Macintosh computer,
having acquired one shortly after its release in 1984. At about the
same time she began to merge video, a medium she had worked with since
the 1970s, with print graphics. Using digitized images that flaunted
their electronic origins, she set about unleashing the creative
potential of the latest technologies. At the same time, in her
unabashedly intuitive approach to layout and composition, Greiman
introduced a new subjectivity into contemporary design practice. A
foldout poster she created for Design Quarterly in 1986,
featuring a life-size nude self-portrait overlaid with various symbols
of personal significance, announced the designer’s intention to “think
with the heart” and reach her audience emotionally. This was the first
of a number of important commissions from Mickey Friedman, then editor
of Design Quarterly and a longtime design curator at the
Walker Art Center. (Greiman and Friedman later collaborated on “The
Gehry Experience,” an exhibition organized for the opening of the
Experience Music Project, Seattle.)
Greiman was equally alert to
the creative potential of the Internet in its infancy, recognizing it
as a new medium that called for a new visual vocabulary. In 1987 she
received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to explore
Web and state-of-the-art technology like Quantel PaintBox, software
used to create video and graphics for television. She started
Greimanski Labs as an offshoot of her studio to research the capacity
of new technologies for image making in a non-commercial setting. She
has created identities and Web sites for institutions like the Southern
California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the MAK Center for
Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, the Los Angeles satellite
of the Austrian Museum of Applied Art, Vienna.
In her work with
architects, Greiman has been much sought-after for her expertise in
color, surfaces and materials, whether applied to building interiors,
exteriors or campuses. The first major commission of this type was the
Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts (1993) in Southern California,
which included the design of exterior tiles and other architectural
elements as well as graphics, an identity system and printed pieces.
She has worked closely with RoTo Architects on several projects,
including: the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony (1993-1994), a hand-built
studio and retreat set on a nature preserve in southern California; the
Reges House (1992-1996), a rehab of an existing electrical building in
downtown Los Angeles; and Warehouse C (1997), a mixed-use pier that
enlivens the skyline of Nagasaki, Japan.
More recently, Greiman
has secured a number of high-profile public art commissions that extend
her exploration of the “color-surfaces-materials” field and continue to
push the boundaries between disciplines. She recently completed an
8,200 square-foot wall mural entitled Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice
at Wilshire Vermont Station, a new housing development sited on the Los
Angeles Metro line in Koreatown, and is at work on a project for the
Burbank airport.
Greiman’s work has been exhibited at the Museum
of Modern Art, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Walker Art
Center. Her work was the subject of a traveling exhibition organized by
the United States Information Agency in the former Soviet Union, and in
2006 the Pasadena Museum of California Art mounted a one-person
exhibition of Greiman’s digital photography, Drive-by Shooting.
She has received the Hallmark Corporation’s Hall Chair Fellowship, the
American Institute of Graphic Arts’ Gold Medal and a Chrysler Design
Award, among other honors.
In addition to her work as a designer,
Greiman has been a singular force in the education of designers and the
advancement of the design profession. “Everything is a teaching and
learning experience,” she says. She has taught at SCI-Arc, where she
has been on the faculty for more than 15 years, California Institute of
the Arts (CalArts), where she also served as director of the visual
communications program, and the Art Center College of Design. She is
the author of several books on design, including Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design (Watson-Guptill Publications, 1990) and Something from Nothing (RotoVision, 2001).
