Michael Bierut: 30 Years/90 Notebooks at Esther Massry Gallery

By Sara Tack

It’s not often that a graphic design show appears in a gallery or a museum and even less often that one shows up in the Capital Region. That’s why it is pretty exciting to see a show of the magnitude of Michael Bierut: 30 Years/90 Notebooks get curated specifically for The College of Saint Rose’s Esther Massry Gallery in Albany.

Bierut, a partner in the renowned design consultancy Pentagram, has had a brilliant career, designing for a host of national and international clients. He is the author of 79 Short Essays on Design and founder of the popular online journal Design Observer. He’s a senior critic at Yale School of Art and frequent guest speaker at design conferences and organizations across the country. His work has won every design award there is to win, including the prestigious American Institute of Graphic Arts medal.

What distinguishes Bierut’s work from much of the design we see on a daily basis is that his pieces use clever, conceptual twists that create messages we have to think twice about. His ability to do this so poignantly is grounded in his knowledge of the subject at hand, his understanding of how to use modernist form to imply meaning, and a natural gift: intuitive wit.

Most of the pieces in the show are posters and most are in black and white. Sometimes the work has (what appears to be) such a simple concept you wonder why you hadn’t thought of it yourself. Yet the beauty comes from just how profound he makes “the simple.”

In one of the few multi-colored works - Obama Fifty State Strategy, 2008, a campaign poster for Barack Obama - every U.S. state’s name is re-presented and strung literally together without word spacing. Separated only by color, we read the play on words starting with Alobama and proceeding alphabetically through Wyobaming.

In the 7th Annual Book Fair to Help the Homeless, Bierut turns a black-and-white image of an open book upside down to create the roof of a house. At the bottom of the poster is a small, out-of-scale, solitary wooden chair. In a poster advertising the play The Well of Water, at the Parallax Theatre (one of many posters for the theatre in the show) we see a stark charcoal line drawing of a woman’s hair and upper torso. The rest of her face is created from stylized photographs. The eyes are hot and cold faucet knobs, her mouth the spout of the faucet where the water emerges. What is he saying about The Well of Water using a faucet metaphor to represent a woman's face? One would have to see the advertised play to find out.

There are quite a few stunning pieces in the show designed for the Architectural League of New York. Usually their purpose is to announce a lecture, or an event series. My favorite is Scale. This 36-by-48-inch horizontal has a solid black circle just under 36 inches in diameter anchored to the left edge of the poster. On the far lower right end of the circle is one word reversed out to white. The typography - all caps, san serif bold letters, not more than 1/4” in height - reads “SCALE.” The sheer literal contrast of scale focuses us on one of the most defining principles in art and architecture. This is extremely powerful.

Light Years, also for the Archi- tectural League, overlaps the letters of these two words laid directly over the other in varying translucencies. Without any literal illustration or photography, the layering of the letters on a solid black background visually suggests distance over time as we read the words “light years.”

Another set of posters for the Yale School of Architecture runs the gamut of Bierut’s thinking. Architecture and Psychoanalysis Symposium is both clever and funny. A modernist, 1960s-style psychiatrist’s couch is turned 90 degrees running vertically up the side of the poster. At a moment’s glance our minds transfer the image of the couch into an architectural structure/building.

Then we realize what we are looking at and can’t help but laugh at being let in on the visual and verbal play. Furthermore, we realize that, although the poster was installed vertically, it could also be presented horizontally (as shown above). It is more difficult to read the detailed text in this orientation, but that text now takes on the role of the architectural reference, suggesting a city skyline.

So what does the title 30 Years/90 Notebooks have to do with the show? There are two cabinets displaying many of Bierut’s black-and-white composition notebooks that he started using in 1982. He has accumulated 92 books in his 30-year career and can’t go anywhere without his most current notebook. They are used for everything from client meeting notes to thoughts on design, miscellaneous ideas, doodles, conceptual sketches, and working out his design process on any given commission. Many of the displayed pages allow viewers to make connections and see the thinking behind the work on the walls of the gallery.

Two-page spread from a Michael Bierut notebook

A commemorative poster was designed for the exhibit by Bierut himself and is available for sale at the gallery, signed or unsigned. Michael Bierut: 30 Years/90 Notebooks is on view through January 22, 2012.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Guest reviewer Sara Tack is principal artist at Smith and Jones and adjunct professor of visual communication & design in the Electronic Media Arts and Communication department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Ten Years: Remembering 9/11 by Marie Triller

In the inevitable push-pull between form and content thatlies behind all photographic imagery, the work of Marie Triller falls squarelyin the middle of the argument. But it’s a pretty big middle and, as seen in thejust-published collection titled Ten Years: Remembering 9/11 ($29.95, JohnIsaacs Books), her work covers much of that range.

Triller, who earned an MFA at SUNY New Paltz and works as ahigh school art teacher, has had a quiet but persistent presence on the CapitalRegion art scene for decades, and for much of that time she has exhibited expertlymade, digitally captured color photographs that represent human culture, often fromtravels to distant places such as Belize, Ireland, and the American Southwest.One might argue that these pictures were clearly documentary in purpose – and thatwould be true – but it is equally true that they were intended as personalartistic expression. The pictures presented in Triller’s new book are noexception to this duality.

Beginning with a full-bleed cover shot of a motorcycle gastank embellished with an exquisite painting of a New York City skylinedominated by hovering ghosts of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, thebook teases the eye as much as it plucks at the heart strings. Immediately, theparameters are shown: This photographer use color, shape, composition, andpoint of view in ways that your everyday documentary photographers do not.

Perusing the sequences of images inside, which are organizedinto nine chapters of equal length, one gathers a cumulative sense of thedeeper meaning behind the work. The result of 10 years’ worth of anniversary visits to thesite of the WTC attacks, these 97 pictures were culled fromthousands, then thoughtfully sequenced to offer Triller’s interpretation of thechapters’ themes: Memory, Security, Expression, Reflection, Community, Courage,Place, Justice, and Spirit.

Triller explains in a short opening essay to the book thatshe avoided the press photographers’ territory in “the pit” at Ground Zero,choosing instead to focus on “the periphery, the crowds who gather eachSeptember 11 morning, and who tell a truer story of that bright, dark day.” Ithink Triller would say that, through these pictures and this book, she isattempting to share that story – their story – with the rest of us.

But a photographer – an observer – cannot set himselfcompletely aside from the story he photographs. And, so, Triller’s book is therecord of her experience of that story, filtered through her eyes and her lens.What I see when I look at these pictures is a wonderfully sensitive, open setof eyes, guided by an equally open heart, which is thrilling and impressive; Ialso see a highly trained and critically honed eye, which is delightful – and impressive.

Which moves me more? In this work, each depends on theother. The picture of a dark-skinned woman clutching a bouquet of multicoloredroses is pure visual candy – made bitter by the knowledge that she has broughtthem not to celebrate a love, but to remember the loss of one. On the pageopposite, low-angled sunlight hides a man’s face in shadow under ared-white-and-blue hardhat; the picture is as balanced as a still life, as theman bows his head reverently, the hat emblazoned with signatures of othersurviving rescue workers.

There are American flags visible throughout this collection,hanging gigantically on buildings, stitched onto clothing, and everywhere inbetween. This is inevitable given the book’s source material, but it is also,perhaps, a sly nod to two seminal photography books of the past century: WalkerEvans’ American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans, both of whichused the presence of the stars and stripes as a visual cue woven into thefabric of the books’ layout schemes.

Triller uses the same technique, placing a photo with aprominent flag at the start of the book and often beginning each section of thebook with one, too. But her tale is not a patriotic or political tract – it isall about the people who come each year to remember the tragedy of 9/11 at itsepicenter and who are presented here with their raw emotions on full display.Included among them are many in uniform, in family groups, in work clothes, businessdress or biker attire. Many also have their own creative or political messageto share, duly recorded by Triller’s camera.

The photos are presented without titles or captions – we aremeant to take them in visually and draw our own conclusions about what they maymean. This is one of the book’s great strengths. It’s difficult to approach asubject so charged without succumbing to the temptation to preach, but it maybe even more difficult to craft a narrative with images alone, as Triller hasdone very successfully here.

Text is provided in the form of a foreword by Sen. KirstenGillibrand, Triller’s introduction, and a thoughtful afterword by EleanorHeartney – all are brief, leaving the pictures to do the real communicating. Theydo it eloquently, and beautifully.

Note: There will be an exhibit of 11 of Marie Triller’s 9/11photographs at The College of Saint Rose’s Massry Center for the Arts atriumgallery, 1002 Madison Ave., Albany. The show opens on Sunday, Oct. 16, and willrun through Sunday, Dec. 11. Triller is an alumna of the college.

The Imaged Word at Albany Airport Gallery

For more than 10 years now, the Albany International Airport Gallery has been providing complex art-viewing experiences for travelers and those who await them; the current show there, titled The Imaged Word, continues that tradition by combining the work of 11 rather diverse artists whose themes relate directly or indirectly to literature.

Far more than a show of book artists (though a few of those included do clearly fit that description), The Imaged Word explores relationships between visual art and writing from many different angles. There are pieces that are almost completely formal, such as Fawn Potash's lovingly rendered black-and-white photographs of old books (one shown below at left), and those that are almost completely conceptual, such as Barbara Todd's ethereally poetic musings on simple stones and the words of Paul Celan.

The large, rambling gallery space upstairs at the airport is well suited to such an inclusive presentation, and its many glass partitions are put to good use in placing some of the abundant text that is included. While I tend to object automatically to art exhibitions that require people to stand and do a lot of reading, in this case it is both totally appropriate and, as many of the gallery's visitors are there expressly to kill time in a valuable way, largely welcome. Still, most of the art speaks volumes with or without the supplemental intellectual rigor.

One of the exhibition's most striking works, an inventive and suggestive wooden sculpture by William Ransom, is perhaps the least directly connected to writing, though it is accompanied by a passage from a T.C. Boyle story. Made from two long, interlocked branches of a tree and their respective sections of trunk, Hold Back Hold Forth (shown at top of post) evokes folk-art traditions while transforming its materials into a sort of two-seater merry-go-round. Like Boyle's writing (which I've always loved), it has a wry sense of humor combined with a feeling of impending doom.

The signature piece in the show is a hall-of-mirrors trick performed by Aaron Stephan, who has built a room-sized arch of venerable volumes and then multiplied it as far as the eye can see (shown at right). His installation is tucked into a corner of the gallery where its unfinished exterior suggests construction under way. I found this design detrimental to the pristine appearance of the rest of the gallery - but perhaps a finished exterior would have provided less of a surprise in the discovery of what it conceals.

Another installation, by Paul Katz, presents an excruciatingly detailed diorama of objects and paintings, all of them covered with obsessively delineated patterns of words from William Wordsworth's epic poem The Prelude (shown at bottom of post). It is a powerful piece in scope and scale, both humbling and inspiring in its representation of artistic diligence, and I think the most emblematic of the show's core theme of the interaction and inspiration between expressive media.

Also deeply imbedded in process are three intriguing small sculptures by Amy Podmore. One was directly inspired by a certain poem a friend of hers had written; for this exhibition, that person was then asked to create new poems in response to Podmore's other two works. This back-and-forth relationship can be quite common in the daily life of dedicated artists, but it rarely gets presented to the public as such, and so is a special addition to this collection.

Painter Gabe Brown includes two connected bodies of work in the show. Her colorful and somewhat fantastic (but modestly sized) paintings are hung in a tight group above a vitrine full of word-stuffed sketchbooks that provide their keys. Across the room, nearly countless blank books of varying size have been filled by Brown with sinuously undulating black lines of ink - one example of the artist-book mode that the show embraces.

In two other examples, Robert The and Scott McCarney have sliced their books into new, three-dimensional forms. McCarney's Last Lines of Poetry, made from one stripped volume, hangs above the gallery's entry stairway like a chandelier. The has modified two books (one shown above at left) by precisely excising the shapes of a scorpion and a scarab beetle from their spines, coolly upending our childhood recollections of playful pop-ups.

The other artists in the show, Fern Apfel (OK, what are the odds of having both a Fawn and Fern in the same show?) and Gayle Johnson have made deftly drawn and colored portraits of beloved books - Johnson's are campy pulp covers (one shown at right), while Apfel's are anonymous groupings that are mainly about color and patina.

The Imaged Word continues through Feb. 27, 2011, and is open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily.

Rating: Recommended

Fence Select at Arts Center of the Capital Region ...

The Fence Show at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy has cemented a place in the annual schedule of many of the area's exhibiting artists, much like the better-known annual Mohawk-Hudson Regional. Though this regional has less prestige, and may draw from a narrower range of practitioners, recent years have demonstrated it is of equal quality to its older sister (which will have a Hyde Collection debut later this year).

Find this assessment surprising? That probably means you haven't seen this year's Fence Select, which was meticulously chosen and assembled by Tang Teaching Museum curator Ian Berry, and which you really must check out if you intend to keep up with who's who on the local art scene.

The list of participants includes names familiar from past editions of both exhibitions, such as Deborah Zlotsky, Ray Felix, and Abraham Ferraro, among others, along with new (to me, anyway) names such as Neil Fryzer, Admiral Donald "Duck" Wilson, and Niki Haynes. There are 53 works in all by 38 artists, representing a strikingly inclusive range of media from mezzotint to magic marker to modified exit sign, and it all holds together with deceptive ease.

The individual artists deserve credit for their fine works, but the real magic maker here is Berry, who was somehow able to cull from a jam-packed gallery full of submissions (as seen in the popular Fence Salon) a crisp combination that reflects the depth and breadth of this region's artists while expressing his sharp curatorial vision. Berry has organized numerous successful shows in his tenure at the Tang, and he also put together the first show in this space, titled Showroom, when the ACCR opened here around 10 years ago.

I will admit I didn't like that show, and my own taste sometimes clashes with Berry's - but his style has grown on me and, I daresay, he has grown a lot as a curator over these years, so I generally expect to like what he does now even if I don't necessarily like his specific choices of art. This is one place where art curating relates to film directing - some directors (Ang Lee, for example) can take almost any sort of story or genre and put it together in a film that you will love regardless of your taste in movies.

A skilled curator can take a concept about art and pull together work that will convince you of it via a fascinating journey through a gallery. Berry's introductory text to Fence Select, in which he invites the viewer "to craft open-ended narratives," describes his concept clumsily but well enough to make it clear. For me, the show delivered on Berry's promise, as a singular organism telling one large, ever-changing story of a vibrant community of artists who refuse to be defined by any style or movement, with boundless creativity and a crystalline sense of purpose.

One outstanding example, pictured above, is Ferraro's Mailable 2, a sculpture that was mailed in four parts as is, requiring some assembly and, more important, some thought to suss out. This piece does many things any ambitious work of art ought to try to do: it transforms its subject matter (in this case, I will take a leap and say the subject is shipping and assembly), makes masterfully innovative use of common materials, communicates visually, and doesn't take itself too seriously. These feats make the piece engaging, enlightening, provocative, and fun - the same characteristics I have come to expect from any show with the Berry touch.

Also on view at the ACCR through Sept. 3 is a weird and witty solo exhibition by Caitlin Foley titled Transmogrify.

Employing various alternative media, including some very nicely constructed artist's books, Foley plays with dualities - a tote that's a tent, sets of favorite or least-favorite sounds, a bird-bicycle that needs your assistance to pedal itself (shown below, with a real finger poking through it). Foley's vision is quirky, if not quite bizarre and, as seen here, is not fully formed - but that's okay for a first-year Syracuse University MFA candidate who shows this much promise.