beautiful intricate and very unique work.
New York City
Today is the opening reception and portfolio signing of friend Luba Lukova’s exhibition Umbrellas, Social Justice & More at La MaMa La Galleria. The exhibition presents a wide range of work including an installation with Luba’s critically acclaimed Social Justice poster portfolio. The Health Coverage poster, which is a part of the collection, was recently in a prestigious exhibit during the Inauguration of President Obama in Washington, DC. The La MaMa show will also feature Lukova’s prints, original drawings and 3-d objects.
“Internationally recognized, New York based Luba Lukova is regarded as one of the most distinctive image-makers working today. Whether by using an economy of line, color, and text to pinpoint essential themes of the human condition or to succinctly illustrate social commentary, her work is undeniably powerful and thought provoking. A recent review in The Boston Globe observes: “Luba Lukova’s posters and illustrations have punch, and they are laced with such feeling that they often merit a second look. Her work doesn’t wrestle with the classic riddles of high art. It is, as graphic art should be, strong and pithy but its messages are not always simple.” (Cate McQuaid, When graphic art becomes high art)
Lukova has won many awards including Grand Prix Savignac at the International Poster Salon, Paris, France; the Golden Pencil Award at the One Club, New York; and Honor Laureate at the International Poster Exhibition in Fort Collins, CO. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at UNESCO, Paris; DDD Gallery, Osaka, Japan; and The Art Institute of Boston. She has received commissions for her work from the The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, Adobe Systems, Sony Music, and Harvard University. Her evocative theatre posters have graced numerous stage productions in the US and Europe. Lukova’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; and Bibliotheque Nationale de France. In 2009 publisher Clay & Gold will release Speaking with Images, a new book about her art. Later this month she will also receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Lesley University.
Congratulations, Luba!
Images: six of the 12 posters from the Social Justice portfolio.
The OFFF Festival, held last week in Lisbon, Portugal, has to be one of the most visually stimulating places I’ve ever been. Herds of bright-faced, young, handsome European artist boys and girls pack by the thousands into an old steel mill. In a cavernous, resonant concrete bunker, the echo of excited chatter never really stops. Instead, to be noticed, presenters have to create visual flash – visual demos here are everything. It almost seems like it shouldn’t work. I notice a few bloggers complained about sometimes-disorganized presentations, the difficulty in hearing (tough for me, and the presentations were in my native language), and the general mayhem. But somehow, it’s the experience of the thing, the fact that presenters have to singe their ideas on optic nerves, that brings it all together.
Lisbon itself is stunning, too – perhaps not the flashiest of European towns, but in its blend of layers of North African, Moorish, Catholic, Latin, it blends into something special that seems to transcend everything around you. It’s never a cliché.
Given all this optical richness and the assembled lenses of some of the best designers in the world, it’s no surprise that Flickr was just overloaded with spectacular images of faces, scenery, and creations from the conference. The conference catalog seems itself like it came from another age: Flickr is the real catalog now. (See the OFFF tag above. If you find some particular gems, please call out your favorite OFFF photographers in comments.)
Oh, yeah … uh … I also took some kinda lo-fi snapshots.(Nope, not a photographer.)
Let’s draw more: a new rallying cry?
But one of my favorite moments of the whole weekend was watching a who’s-who of digital designers pick up Sharpies and sign the back of OFFF chief curator Hector Ayuso’s laptop. This is great on a number of levels. For one, getting to deface Apple’s pure minimalist design is deeply satisfying. And there’s something terrific about overlaying a digital design object with that old standby of creation, the Sharpie marker. But mostly, it was seeing these folks draw. I hope onstage doodling could be mandatory for next year’s conference.
More photos, which as I look back at them do oddly seem to represent my own memory of what I was looking at, whether or not they’re interesting to anyone else.
Seriously, anyone who comes across especially fantastic photos or video, send them our way! I haven’t had time to dig through Vimeo and Flickr since returning, and already what I saw was, I thought, oddly beautiful even if you weren’t there. (I think some people are good enough photographers that they live in a more beautiful version of reality.)
Lastly, a montage that has been circulating on Vimeo (I know nothing about the person who created it, but it’s quite nice).
OFFF 2009 oeiras from Bart Kiggen on Vimeo.
The first project to come out of the non-profit organisation, Designers Against Human Rights Abuse – founded last year by Rishi Sodha – is a collection of art and design work that focuses on the Tibetan struggle…
The DAHRA organisation exists to raise awareness among those in the creative industries of their social, political and ethical responsibilities, as well as bring attention to different instances of human rights abuse around the world.
As such, Designers Against Tibetan Abuse, focuses specifically on the struggle for Tibetan rights and is a combination of a book, a limited edition Si Scott silkscreen poster and an exhibition at London’s Cork Street Gallery that is set to take place this summer.
52 creatives from around the world have all contributed pieces that take issue with the Tibetan human rights question. We spoke to Sodha about the reasoning behind the book.
CR: What you think a book like this can achieve simply by collecting and showing these art projects?
Rishi Sodha: In order to answer this question one has to understand the fundamental aims of DAHRA, which not only exists to promote awareness of human rights abuse, but to also raise awareness of ethical practice amongst creative professionals.
As such the Designers Against Tibetan Abuse is a project that combines a book featuring many of the most talented creatives in the industry today, a limited edition Si Scott poster and an exhibition in London, with all proceeds going to Tibet Relief Fund.
However, unlike many other organisations, we realise that a combination of these three mediums isn’t anywhere near enough in terms of raising awareness of such an important issue and so merely is a starting point. Therefore we are currently working on a film and second publication on the Tibetan issue to be launched alongside the exhibition this summer.
This is principally how DAHRA works, whereby we have two or three issues we wish to focus on and run projects on these topics for up to two years in order to ensure we make a real difference. These projects are a combination of closed (invitation only) projects such as the DATA book and projects open to all our members (anyone can join).
The most unique thing about DAHRA is that it is run by creatives for creatives and therefore we try to keep the briefs as open as possible, thus giving our members a break from the restrictions of client driven work. In fact we encourage our members to explore mediums and styles that they’ve never had a chance to work with before in order to express their voices.
It is this approach we feel that will hopefully ensure that we can meet our goals of raising awareness of human rights and promoting ethical practice amongst creatives.
CR: Are all the pieces in some way related to the Tibetan struggle? Can you highlight a few of the ways that the designers have dealt with the issue through their work?
RS: Firstly, I think it’s important to point out that DAHRA doesn’t support the discrimination of anyone and as such when we briefed our contributors we stressed the fact that this is not an attack on the Chinese but rather an opportunity to promote awareness of Tibetan Rights.
Having said that, the response was overwhelming and varied with some contributors choosing to focus on more subtle themes of love and spirit, such as Shame Mielke, Si Scott & Alex Trochit, whilst others focused on the more political aspect of the Tibetan issue, such as Jonathan Barnbrook and Nick Hard (Research Studios) and others chose to draw their inspiration from Tibetan Culture itself, such as Tokyo Plastic and Christopher Cox.
The full list of contributors to the book runs as follows:
Nik Ainely (Shinybinary), Anna Badar, Jonathan Barnbrook, Adhemas Batista, Bek 03, Luisa Bernardes, Diana Bodea, Bartek Bojarczuk, Jon Burgerman, Jonathan Calugi, Giovanni Capriotti, Christopher Cox (ChangetheThought), Nicholas Creevy, Sebastien Cuypers, Adam Dedman, Neil Duerden, Andy Ellison, Nima Falatoori (NMO design), Theo Gennitsakis, Alex Haigh (thinkdust), Christine Hale (Love,Christine), Nick Hard (Research Studios), David Harris, Sean Canty, Mike Harrison, Peter Harrison, Nessim Higson (IamAlwaysHungry), Piotr Holub, Eli Horn, Eric Jordan (2advanced.com), Evgeny Kiselev, Niklas Lundberg (diftype), Justin Maller (Depthcore), Chow Martin, Kevin Megens (Karma.tv), Shane Mielke (2advanced), Nathaniel Milburn, Saad Moosajee, Jared Nickerson (J3concepts), Joao Oliveira, Snehal Sanghani, Loic Sattler, Si Scott, Rishi Sodha, This is Pacifica, Bram Timmer, Tokyo Plastic, Alex Trochut, Ana Ventura, Ari Weinkle, Oliver Wiegner (Ice Cream For Free)
Read more more about DAHRA at dahra.org.
All photography: Nicholas Creevy.
You can purchase the book for £20 from enlightenedgifts.org. All proceeds go directly to the Tibet Relief Fund, who are also distributing the book.
Fallon London and B-reel have worked together to relaunch the Cheesestrings brand, with a entertaining campaign site at mrstrings.co.uk.
The joyful playground invites kids to create their elastic and cheesy characters and place them in the Meadow, a world where one must find clues and avoid several traps. Beautiful illustrations along with well thought character physics will surely be delightful to the core audience, and the sounds reminded me of the also wonderful World Of Goo. Which is my way of saying that i love a well crafted kids website.
