Curatorial

Not long after the Archive opened it was clear that Rob’s collection of 15,000 items was just the seed for something much bigger. Within the first two years, our holdings doubled thanks to the generosity and recommendations of donors and guests. We welcomed the Tholenaar type specimen collection, and the archives of Emigre, pioneers of digital design, and Ross F. George, author of the Speedball textbooks. We soon formed a curatorial team to individually and collectively identify material that could tell an even broader story. By 2020, as we prepared to move to a new location, the count topped 100,000 objects and we stopped counting.

More important than the number of items in the Archive is the growing number of ways we try to represent the diverse scope of written communication. For several years now, our primary collecting focus has been on people, places, and scripts that are underrepresented in the Western design canon. The selections shown here—and throughout this exhibition—span the globe, from Tokyo to Prague to México City. And the methods of making are just as expansive, from a slate of classic Roman capitals chiseled by America’s preeminent stonecutter, to marker-drawn graffiti that challenges convention and legibility, to an urgent message of protest painted on a makeshift flag. At the Archive, a massive calligraphic woodcut can sit next to a micrographic goat drawn with tiny handwritten words.