East Coast/West Coast: Graphic Designers in the United States
Le Mois du graphisme d’Echirolles, Paris France, 2002 and Galerie-Anatome, Paris France, 2003
Curated by Michel Bouvet
Exhibition text from Galerie-Anatome (translated from french to english).
Since opening the Gallery, we knew the day would come when we should try to us to present an inventory of fixtures of graphics from the United States. Frightening challenge! How to discover the most current practitioners of American graphics, while also covering the work of the outstanding figures who where the originators of his undeniable radiation? Thanks to collaboration that we engage with the graphic Center of Echirolles, this double objective can be reached. And how! East Coast/West Coast is the fruit of an incredible intellectual and physical tour of a country scaling the entire continent. East Coast/West Coast allows, aims to tie and untie the thread between New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, and create a bind between the diverse generations.
One area of the exhibition focuses initially on Seymour Chwast, emblematic figure of Push Pin Studios and the counter-culture of the Seventies. The work of Chwast covers the possibilities of graphic design: posters, editions, covers of books, small pockets of discs, illustrations of press. For Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser and Push Pin Studio, the images must be in the service of the ideas. Humor and a critical spirit, are their preferred weapons. Works which they produced had a formidable repercussion within American youth. The posters against the war of Vietnam have a considerable impact in all the country and are used as catalyst with the popular protest. Seymour Chwast does not change. Faithful to its engagements, it publishes and carries out today the very caustic Nose review. This young man remains always mobilized on the face of the graphic design.
West Coast, or the "California dream," is the second shutter of the exposure. It is devoted to young Californian graphic designers; crossing of individuals or collective adventures. What do they make and how? A series of profiles illustrates the great diversity of the situations and the productions of the design of books, posters or experimental projects. . . until the realization of film credits, such as Spiderman, Mission impossible or Harry Potter. Surprised! Whatever the major evolutions, the influence of the market, the ruptures related to new technologies, the general inspiration remains deeply marked by the sound and visual spirit of the Sixties. East Coast/West Coast is a voyage between space and time once again reveal the permanence of America brilliant, restive and generous, that which, by these disturbed times, we continue to like.
Designers in exhibition: Seymour Chwast, Denise Gonzales Crisp, Louise Sandhaus, Jon Sueda, ReVerb, Jens Gehlhaar, Anne Burdick, Imaginary Forces, Jeff Keedy, Heebok Lee, Michael Worthington, Gail Swanlund, Lucille Tenazas, Jim Curl, Geoff Kaplan, Martin Venezky.
