Text/Messages: Books by Artists, organized by Walker curator Siri Engberg and Walker librarian Rosemary Furtak, is a very exciting exhibition opening tomorrow, December 18, 2008, and will be up until April 19, 2009. It will feature artist books from the Walker’s extensive library and collection that rarely get displayed for public viewing, so its an absolute treat for this show to be happening. As a…

It seems too good to be true, but SF author Samuel R. Delany is speaking at the Walker on November 15th, in conjunction with the exhibition Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis. Of his mind-bending masterpiece Dhalgren, critic Kate McKinney Maddalena writes  “… [it] ranks Delany with Samuel Beckett; I would teach it as a Nouveau Roman alongside the work of Duras and Borges.” If you’re new to Delany, I might…

The following is extracted from a series of lectures about relational design practices. A related article can be found at Design Observer. A seemingly random selection of projects from various design fields with an underlying thread: An expansion strategy for the Hermitage Museum in Russia simply annexes the surrounding government-owned buildings in St. Petersburg, increasing the available space…

ASDF’sFor a Brief Time Only… is a purchasable exhibition of 24 artists available at a photo developer near you. You can find it at any store that allows file uploading via the internet (including most major US drug-stores). The image files will be sent to the closest location near you, and within minutes you will be able to walk in and pick them up as prints. This exhibition contains 24 small 4×6…

Alberto Rigau created a set of buttons to keep his fellow NC State University graphic design graduate students perky during marathon critiques. They spread like a viral video… appearing on the t-shirts, lapels and bags of undergrads in my classroom. I too coveted the buttons. It may be superstition, but crits seem to go smoother when I rock a crit button. The phenomenon spread to SpeakUp, Design…

On my way out of the Walker Library the other day a little red spine caught my attention. I grabbed the hardback book off the shelf and started paging through and was immediately charmed by what I was seeing and reading. What was bound between those two red covers was a small sampling of the Great Bear Pamphlet series. Each pamphlet is simply produced with black printing on colored sheets of…

Please join us on Thursday, November 6, at 7 and 9 pm, for two screenings of Typeface. After the screening will be a conversation with its director, Justine Nagan; Bill Moran, St. Paul-based designer and letterpress guru who cowrote a book documenting Hamilton; and Greg Corrigan, designer and Hamilton technical director. Typeface documents the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers…

In the exhibition Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, which I co-curated last winter, the big box store figured prominently—a newer form of suburban retail that is undergoing change. While installing the exhibition, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, I happened to learn that Target had been planning a new specially designed store near Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit that is home to the famed…

Dwadle & Gape, Yale’s 2008 Graphic Design MFA thesis book show opens at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing on October 24th. Future dates, both in Europe and the US, are scheduled to be announced later this year. “Books are important for many reasons. In a time of instant communication and instant gratification, books exhort us to slow down and consider things more carefully. Where…