Events
Salon Series 51: Piet Zwart’s NKF
with Paul Stirton, Elizabeth Meggs
Explore the legendary typographic masterpiece for a Dutch cable company that redefined catalog design.
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Our latest publication, NKF: Piet Zwart’s Avant-Garde Catalog for Standard Cables, 1927–1928, brings to life a typographic masterpiece by one of twentieth century’s most influential designers. With a complete facsimile and an in-depth supplement featuring essays by design scholars Philip Meggs and Paul Stirton, page-by-page translations of the catalog, reproductions from a decade of designs for Dutch cable company NKF, and Zwart’s own manifesto on type, NKF offers readers a chance to experience and own a design classic.
Join us online for a conversation about Zwart’s pathbreaking work with Paul Stirton, whose new essay “Piet Zwart, NKF, and the New Typography” appears in the supplement. Stirton will present in discussion with artist and writer Elizabeth Meggs.
Paul Stirton
Paul Stirton is Emeritus Professor of the History of European Design at Bard Graduate Center in New York, and the editor of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press. He is the author of many books, articles, and exhibition catalogs, including Burne-Jones and William Morris: Designs for the Aeneid and the Kelmscott Chaucer (1996), “Is Mr. Ruskin living too Long?” Selected Writings of E.W. Godwin on Victorian Architecture, Design and Culture (with Juliet Kinchin, 2005), and Jan Tschichold and the New Typography (2019).
Elizabeth Meggs
Elizabeth Meggs is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, and designer. In recent years, she’s had six solo shows of new work and has exhibited in more than 100 group shows, including Go Brooklyn! with the Brooklyn Museum, Sweet Lorraine Gallery, Galapagos Art Space, Edward Hopper House, Lincoln Center, and Pratt Institute. In 2021, she was one of 78 artists selected for CowParade New York City. In 2022, she was selected as one of ten artists in New York City to create an ice sculpture for the Inaugural Governors Island Ice Sculpture Exhibition. The same year, she was one of 20 observers from across America selected to be on-site at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA’s DART Mission spacecraft-asteroid collision.
