Gallery Review: Graphic Art with a Mission

Graphic Art with a Mission

Bright blocks of color and bold text enveloped the towering white walls of the Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Western Michigan University. “The Graphic Imperative” displayed from January 14th through February 19th, 2010 consisted of one hundred twenty one posters spanning forty years of international sociopolitical themes including environmental, anti-war, human rights, literacy, and AIDS awareness.

The eye-catching giants, some six feet high, overwhelmed the spacious gallery. Curators Elizabeth Resnick and Chaz Maviyane-Davies from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and Frank Baseman of Philadelphia University stated the initial purpose of these posters is to “jar us to action through bold messages.” But when viewed as art, some remain just concepts and others shine for artistic prowess. The best posters do both.

Some messages sang out loud and clear: Julius Friedman’s “Illiteracy, we all pay the price” (1989) consists of a large black X on white with “This is the way 27 million Americans sign their name” underneath. The simple, stark work makes no room for multiple interpretations, yet eliminates graphic admiration in the process.

Likewise, Swiss artist Niklaus Trokler employed simplicity for “Dead Trees” (1992). The brown half circles representing tree stumps across a neon green background look like something designed in the Microsoft Paint program. But the stumps’ shocking red surfaces turn the scene violent, shouting environmental destruction with one glance.

Alternatively, some artists valued artistry over message. Two pieces from the Endangered Species poster series started by a 1975 student strike workshop at Massachusetts College of Art employ large caricatures of animals. “Endangered Giant Panda” (1982) and “Endangered Cuban Crocodile” (1985) seem like children’s story book illustrations, their friendly colors masking any sense of endangerment even with the word “endangered” on both pieces.

The artists that paired creative graphics with a powerful message elicited the largest emotional responses, some using similar methods for shock value. Two artists working thirty years apart represented inadvertent human destruction with interlocking biting figures. In “Hunger Crime” (1998) by Luba Lokova a series of personified drumsticks bite the bone of the adjacent one with vicious looks their eyes. In Tomi Urgerer’s “Black Power, White Power”(1967) two skeletal figures—identical except for their color— fit together like tessellations as they bite the foot of the other, symbolizing race relations in the late 1960s.

In another bold piece, “Lipstick” (1972), Cuban artist José Gómez Fresquet created in his words, a “jarring interplay between the realities of two women” using only four colors. The silhouette of a white woman outlined in black puckers her lips for lipstick, while a woman’s yellow face comes from the right hand darkness, blood dripping from her nose out of the same vibrant red as the lipstick.

These public service posters are usually seen first for their message and secondly, if at all, seen for design. By showing the posters in a gallery, “The Graphic Imperative” exhibition opened the door for appreciating the ingenuity behind effective message driven art.