Our San Francisco gallery exhibits selections from over 100,000 objects of graphic design. Each show is supported by a rich online exhibition.

Letterform Archive Members get permanent access to all online exhibitions.

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Typographic Jazz: The Monoprints of Jack Stauffacher

January 27, 2024 – June 9, 2024

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 Curated by Rob Saunders, this show features more than 100 prints, sketches, iterative proofs, and other unpublished explorations, demonstrating the creative potential of letterpress.

Visit the teaser site Buy the book that inspired the show

Subscription to Mischief: Graffiti Zines of the 1990s

May 6, 2023 – January 7, 2024

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.

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Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest

July 23, 2022 – April 16, 2023

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.

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Bauhaus Typography at 100

April 28, 2022 – June 11, 2022

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.

Visit the online exhibition Buy the exhibition catalog