Events
Type and Materiality
with Martin Venezky
A designer and photographer reflects on how creating and manipulating forms in the physical world are central to his process.
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Martin Venezky’s process explores everything from traditional collage (cutting, scanning, and taping) to the integration of photography, drawing, and installation techniques. Venezky will speak about the evolution of his process and how form and materiality are at the forefront of his practice. This salon runs concurrently with the Reading Room exhibition Martin Venezky: Process Work. The exhibition features over 50 process collages that serve as byproducts of the “finished” graphic design objects and gives viewers a peek into how he creates his signature ornate and dynamic typographic compositions.
Martin Venezky
Martin Venezky is an artist, photographer, and designer exploring relationships between objects, form, drawing, and the image. His work shifts scale from intimate gatherings of discarded objects to expansive wall-sized installations. In 2001 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art honored Venezky with a solo exhibition, and in 2005 his monograph It Is Beautiful…Then Gone was published by Princeton Architectural Press.
Venezky has an undergraduate degree in Visual Studies from Dartmouth College and, in 2024 Venezky completed a second MFA in Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art, thirty years after receiving his first MFA in 2D Design from the same institution.
He has taught at RISD and CalArts and, for more than thirty years, at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he is currently Professor Emeritus in the MFA Design Program. His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, and San Francisco’s Letterform Archive.
Venezky continues to lecture, offer workshops, and display his work to a wide international audience. Most recently he was awarded a three-week residency in Halsnøy, Norway, and a three-month residency at the University of Arkansas Fort Smith, both of which resulted in exhibitions of the work made on site.
