With Valentine's Day now behind us, the big box stores have already cleared out their seasonal shelves for the next holiday. At the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio, however, I found myself surrounded by several hundred years of old valentine cards and mementos adorning the walls, halls, and chairs.
Earlier this week, as I struggled to open a package from the mail, I sighed and wished that boxes were better designed. But with it being almost Thanksgiving here in America, I knew the stores would already be full of Christmas wares. And, accordingly, some very interesting boxes!
Holed up at the Wurlitzer Foundation in the early months of the pandemic, another artist taught me the game of cribbage. Cribbage was invented by the poet John Suckling in the early 17th century, and was featured in The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens. Today, it continues to be a favorite pastime for sailors, especially on American submarines.
With the advent of online bookstores, the cover of a book has become our first visual interaction with unknown tomes. Still, though, in bookstores and libraries and our friends' shelves at dinner parties, we are most often greeted by the spine of a book. It is, despite that familiarity, maybe a bit neglected as a design form—more like the edge of a cassette tape case than the front of a record sleeve.
MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish shares her stories of experiences with selected books featuring Nick Cave, Jen Bervin, Mary Ruefle, Barbara Bourland, Carl Belz, J.M. Arms Sheldon, and Camille Flammarion.
Tucked away on the outskirts of Roswell, NM, far away from the daily bustle of the alien museum, lies the Roswell Artist in Residence Program. The residency hosts six artists a year and each, near the end of their residency, has a solo exhibition. Each exhibition is followed by a dinner, which is prefaced by a handmade invitation from the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art's Director Nancy Fleming. She has been making these special invitations since 2004, and here is a peek into these small treasures.
Lewis Wickes Hine, A construction worker at the Empire State Building, 1931. (Photo courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Gallery) Books Worth Reading Skyscrapers: A History of the World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings By Judith Dupré. Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 176 pages [...]
Lisa Dahl, Suburban Export, household cardboard, 1.5 x 2 x 2 inches (each), installation variable, 2011-12. View the finished installation Suburban Export here. (In-Progress photo of installation by Lisa Dahl courtesy the artist) "Everyone, rich or poor, deserves a shelter for the soul." -Samuel Mockbee The [...]
(Photo via Pinterest. Original Source: ClareNol via Flickr) All good things can benefit from an occasional makeover. Penguin Classics are the perfect example. The publishing imprint is highly regarded in design circles for their book jacket designs. Starting in the late 40s, German typographer Jan Tschichold created the early [...]
Tadao Ando, Church of the Light, 1989. Osaka, Japan. Philadelphia is a city awash with memorable architecture, so it's fitting that I stumbled across The Architect Says: Quotes, Quips, and Words of Wisdom at the Philadelphia Museum of Art's store, which offers a well-curated assortment of books inside of [...]
The wreckage of Rockaway Boardwalk after Sandy (Image via CNN.com) A few months ago I shared Eve Mosher's piece, High Water Line, a public art project in Manhattan and Brooklyn that brought the topic of climate change directly to the city’s residents. Mosher's inventive project showed what [...]
Sam Green narrating his live documentary The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison) "I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am [...]
A 1968 poster parodying the Nixon campaign's motto, "Nixon's the one!" (Courtesy the Library of Congress) Election Day is finally here, and I thought it would be fun to explore some of the campaign posters from past presidential elections. All of the posters featured here are in [...]
Tatzu Nishi's public art installation, Discovering Columbus, opened in Manhattan on Thursday. Here Nishi is pictured with Gaetano Russo's 1892 sculpture. (Photo by Tom Powel courtesy the Public Art Fund, NY) Last week I featured Tatzu Nishi's Discovering Columbus on my Don't Miss List for September. Two [...]
Ai Weiwei's Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 has been good company the past few days. Between 2006 and 2009, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei used his blog as a daily notebook where he posted thousands of photos, documented his artistic practice and personal [...]
If you're fed up with partisan bickering and political dysfunction in Washington, the gratifying, lavishly-illustrated book High Line: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, might temper your burgeoning cynicism. The book is a lesson in what can [...]
Inhabitat has just published a short piece on Rockefeller Center's hidden rooftop gardens. The Center has been maintaining these gardens for the past 75 years, but public access to the gardens is a rare event. According to Inhabitat, the building's developer John R. Todd and architect Raymond Hood originally envisioned a [...]
One of the benefits of living in a rural place like New Hampshire is that interactions with wild animals occur on a daily basis. I see birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects when I'm hiking, commuting to work, or simply strolling around the yard. Wild turkeys, bears, grouse, moose, [...]
One of my favorite book discoveries this summer is Drainspotting by Remo Camerota. The book celebrates an array of fascinating manhole cover designs from Japan. According to Camerota, nearly 95% of the 1,780 municipalities in Japan have their very own customized manhole covers. The country has elevated this humble, practical object to its [...]
You may not know graphic designer Milton Glaser by name, but you undoubtedly know his work. He is best known for the “I ♥ NY” logo, his "Bob Dylan" poster, the "DC bullet" logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005, and the "Brooklyn Brewery" logo. He also founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968 and was [...]
Last week the world's longest sea bridge, the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge in China, opened to traffic. The bridge, which is 26.4 miles long, would easily span the English Channel and is almost three miles longer than the previous record-holder, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, officially making it the world's [...]