Letterform Archive Exhibitions

Amos Kennedy, Jr.: Citizen Printer, the major solo exhibition features over 150 type-driven artifacts from the self-described “humble negro printer”.

An exhibition of rarely seen work explores the iconic Bay Area printer’s playful and improvisational process. Using a mismatched set of 19th-century wood block letters, Stauffacher reimagined type as abstract form. Curated by Rob Saunders, this show features more than 100 prints, sketches, iterative proofs, and other unpublished explorations, demonstrating the creative potential of letterpress.

Featuring Greg Lamarche’s archives and Letterform Archive’s collection of graffiti magazines, Subscription to Mischief, opening on May 6, 2023, explores over 40 graffiti zines with a special focus on the making of Skills Magazine. It highlights original works by prominent and lesser-known writers of the era through the pieces, throwups, and handstyles featured in letters, flick trade photos, and magazine submissions. Taking a close look at practitioners as documentarians, and how magazines served as launch pads for creative careers, Subscription to Mischief is a time capsule of graffiti letterforms and a tribute to the community formed through snail mail.

Letterform Archive’s second exhibition celebrates design that empowers communities and fights oppression. Curated by Silas Munro of the design studio Polymode with Stephen Coles of Letterform Archive, Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest features more than 100 objects, including broadsheets, buttons, signs, t-shirts, posters, and ephemera spanning the 1800s to today. In sections exploring the many ways to voice dissent (VOTE!, RESIST!, LOVE!, TEACH!, and STRIKE!), the show charts a typographic chant of resistance across more than a century of protest graphics.

The Bauhaus looms large as one of the most influential legacies in twentieth-century graphic design. Known for its bold sans serif typefaces, crisp asymmetrical grids, and clean use of negative space, the school seized upon advances in printing and mass production to create a radical new art. Today, just over one hundred years after its opening, the Bauhaus’s visual hallmarks have, for many, come to define modernity as it appears on the printed page. A special edition of Bauhaus Typography at 100 is on view at the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies.