Massin In San Francisco :
California College of the Arts and the San
Francisco Center for the Book
Symposium, reception, exhibition
Dates and Times :
Symposium
:: Saturday 20 September 2003, 2-4 p.m.
Reception
:: 4:15-6:30 p.m.
Exhibition
:: Through Friday 26 Serptember 2003
Venues :
Symposium
Timken Lecture Hall, CCA
1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco
(get directions online at http://www.sfcb.org/index.php3)
Reception and Exhibition
San Francisco Center for the Book
300 De Haro Street (16th Street side) San Francisco
The Events :
Saturday, September 20, the Center is pleased to present a very special
event connected to our current exhibition "Massin in Continuo: a
Dictionary." Robert Massin is coming from Paris, curator Laetitia Wolff from
New York, and type and design authority John Berry from Seattle for a
symposium on Massin's career as one of the world's great book designers.
Not since the visit by Hermann Zapf in 2001 have we been host to such a
distinguished guest. Please join us to honor this truly innovative and
historically significant design artist.
Saturday afternoon, September 20th, 2-4 PM there will be a public
presentation at Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts
(formerly CCAC). CCA is at 1111 Eighth Street, two and a half a blocks from
the Center. This will be followed at 4:15-6:30 by a reception at the
Center.
The Center would like to thank the Mills College Center for the Book,
California College of the Arts, the Book Club of California, and the Society
of Typographic Aficionados for helping make this event possible.
About the Exhibition :
Through September 26, San Francisco Center for the Book hosts "Massin in
Continuo: A Dictionary," a touring exhibition devoted to the French graphic
design artist Robert Massin (known simply as Massin). Curated by Laetitia
Wolff, founder of the New York-based marketing/design firm futureflair and
editor-in-chief of Graphis magazine, it represents the first major
exhibition of Massinıs work in the U.S.
This touring exhibition originated at the Cooper Union School of Art's Herb
Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography in New York and has since been
seen in Los Angeles, Boston, Baltimore, and Montreal.
Exhibition produced by futureflair, with help from the Cultural Services
Department of the French Embassy, New York.
About Massin :
Working within multiple disciplines with elegance and humor, Massin
transcends many long-established boundaries in graphic design. His career
has spanned editorial graphics, poster and logo design, art direction,
typography, photography, publishing, design education, and writing. Long
before the idiosyncratic, broken type of the '90s, Massin dared to play with
letters, manipulating the alphabet, cutting titles, experimenting with
forms, signs, and fonts, and creating surprising three-dimensional
limited-edition covers. This exhibition includes a wide range of Massin's
work: everything from his exploration of letterforms and images to his work
as an art director at Club du Meilleur Livre and Gallimard.
Massin is considered the father of expressive typography. His graphic
interpretations of dramatic works remain some of the most unique and
influential examples of the potential for dynamic interaction between word
and image. As a scholar, his in-depth survey of letterforms in Western
cultures, Letter & Image, is a major contribution to the understanding of
graphic arts and an essential reference for graphic designers. The work
looks beyond the letter as a necessary accessory to the image and celebrates
its rhythmic and plastic qualities. His manipulations of typography in the
1950s anticipated the elastic spatial possibilities of computer graphics.
Massin's collaborations with writer Jean Cocteau and playwright Eugène
Ionesco yielded a new "visualized literature." His master work for
Gallimardıs 1964 edition of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano combines the
pictorial economy of a comic book with the letter play of Surrealist poetry.
For more on Massin see John Berry's online article:
http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/19759.html
More Info :
San Francisco Center for the Book
300 De Haro Street
San Francisco, CA
T: 1-415-565-0545
E : info@sfcb.org
W: http://www.sfcb.org/index.php3
TDC Type Directors Club
60 East 42nd Street
Suite 721
New York, NY 10165-0721
USA
T : 1-212-983-6042
F : 1-212-983-6043
E : director@tdc.org
W : http://www.tdc.org/
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