News / Exhibitions

Since opening in 2015, Letterform Archive has grown from a 15,000-item private collection, to a publicly accessible resource of over 100,000 objects. The works of lettering, typography, and graphic design span movements and continents, but what ties everything together is text, the essential material of culture. This common thread lets anyone—from type nerds to poets, coders to cooks—have an entry point into the collection. Our dedication to radical access has made the Archive a thriving community hub, welcoming thousands of visitors from more than 40 countries, and offering an unparalleled opportunity to engage directly with masterpieces of design.

The big wall in Letterform Archive’s reading room now serves as a display case for small, short-run exhibitions. Our first pop-up opened in January to celebrate Lunar New Year. Curated by members of the Archive exhibition team, Jen Dao (姚逸雯) and Sherry Chou (徐雪俐), Good Luck explores the rich cultural heritage and modern interpretations of the holiday through a blend of custom red envelopes, holiday ephemera, and celebration event posters.

Among the contemporary pieces in Good Luck are four large screen prints featuring complex, stylized animals intertwined with letterforms. The posters come from the hive mind of Omnivore, a graphic design studio formed by “second-generation Asian-Americans, working mothers, design educators, small business owners, food lovers, justice seekers, and friends.” Alice Chung (Brooklyn), Karen Hsu (Portland, Oregon); and Julie Cho (Los Angeles) have been collaborating since 2002 and often think of themselves as a three-headed monster. Their firm is M/WBE (Minority- & Woman-owned) certified.

Through the use of bold language, graphic typography, and colorful layers, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s prints embody an intensity that catches the eye and provokes the mind. He is extremely outspoken about the impact of white supremacy and racism. These themes are reflected in Kennedy’s work and encompass the evolving trajectory of Black liberation in the United States. From growing up in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Era, to the rise of Black Nationalism in the 1970s, to the present Post-Civil Rights era, Kennedy has seen how these movements shaped Black identity in the United States and has drawn from this as inspiration.

Letterform Archive has a long and close relationship with the work of Jack Stauffacher. We hold a significant run of his Greenwood Press books; we published a book on his wood type prints; and we are the home of his studio archive. This last collection — rich in private experiments — sparked the idea for an exhibition of the artist’s work that has yet to be shown in public. Curated by Rob Saunders, the show explores Stauffacher’s playful and improvisational typography and features more than 100 prints, sketches, iterative proofs, and other explorations of his creative process.

Our next exhibition celebrates a combination seldom seen on museum walls. Featuring Greg Lamarche’s archives and Letterform Archive’s collection of graffiti magazines, Subscription to Mischief explores 1990s graffiti zines with a special focus on the making of Skills. It highlights original works by prominent and lesser-known writers of the ’90s 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.

In collaboration with Polymode, we’re excited to announce Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest, a new exhibition on view beginning July 23, 2022. Curated by Silas Munro of the design studio Polymode with Stephen Coles of Letterform Archive, the exhibition will feature more than 100 objects, including broadsides, 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 will chart a typographic chant of resistance across more than a century of protest graphics.

Letterform Archive’s current exhibition celebrates, among many things, the centenary of the Bauhaus. Such recognition indicates the significant impact of the school in modern culture. The Bauhaus has become synonymous with minimal and geometric systems of design. This makes it convenient to attribute this school of thought as a source for any graphic work that shares these characteristics, but similar ideas have been around long before the Bauhaus. The Ecuador, the Land of the Shuar poster that is part of the “Beyond the Bauhaus” section of the show is an example of contemporary designers practicing some of the principles associated with the school, and, in this case, principles rooted in a marginalized history.

Our first installment of this two-part series showcased the various typefaces found in official publications and other objects by Bauhaus instructors and students. We learned that the type used at the school was primarily utilitarian, readily available to printers at the time. But what about the radical geometric letterforms we connect to Bauhaus principles? Let’s look at minimalist typefaces inspired by the school, many of which live on as commercial successes long after the institution was forced to close down.