Events
The Mysterious Case of the Shapeshifting Poblano Blackletter
with Jesús Barrientos Mora
Take a savory bite into Puebla, a five-century-old Mexican city with an exceptional taste for blackletter hybrids.
- Date
- Time
There is an unspoken tradition of letter-making in the streets of Puebla and other Mexican cities. It emanates from multi-generational sign painters who invented styles that cross traditional categorization, combining the shapes that appear in lettering manuals, vice royal documents, and a free interpretation of blackletter in an unapologetic need for self-expression. In this lecture, we will explore some details of what we can call the “post-modern Mexican blackletter hand” in a colorful collection of Poblano blackletter.
Letterform Lectures are a public aspect of the Type West postgraduate program. The series is co-presented by the San Francisco Public Library, where events are free and open to all.
Jesús Barrientos Mora
Jesús Barrientos Mora is Associate Professor at BUAP (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla) and since 2014 research fellow to the Scaliger Instituut, at the Leiden University Library. Author of the book Legado de los Elzevir (2015) and certified in Typeface Design (University of Reading, 2018), he has lectured in several institutions like the Dublin Institute of Technology (2015), Warsaw Academy of Arts (2016), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2017), the University of Birmingham (2018), and the Sheffield Hallam University (2019). His typefaces are currently distributed through the Monotype channels and have been awarded by the Bienal Tipos Latinos, Bienal Iberoamericana de Diseño, and Premios Clap, and he has participated in many exhibitions in the Americas and Europe.
