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Rene Wanner's Poster Blog

Plakat-Wettbewerb Polnisches Alphabet: A poster competition about polish-german cooperation. Eligible are german and polish students of graphic design, illustration and related subjects, the deadline is November 30, 2004.

Russian Avantgarde exhibition at the Tretiakov Gallery, Engineers Building, in Moscow, until August 15. A unique chance to see the Lisitski, Rodchenko, Klutsis and Stenberg Brothers originals. (from the KAK blog, in russian)

Showtime - a century of czech film posters, an exhibition at the Macao Museum of Art from July 9 to October 3, 2004, curated by Marta Sylvestrova from the Moravian Gallery in Brno (CZ).

25 pdf pages about the Mois du Graphisme d'Echirolles 2004 November 19, 2004 until January 15, 2005. (News received from Thierry Sarfis)

The Women of Juarez Demand Justice! is a poster exhibition opening today, Wednesday, July 28, 2004, 7:30 p.m. Salon at the Yard Warszawa Restaurant 1414 Lincoln Blvd. at Santa Monica Blvd. in Santa Monica, California sponsored by Office of the Americas and Warszawa Restaurant

The founder and Executive Director of Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG), will speak about the murders of the women in Juarez, how the exhibition "The Women of Juarez Demand Justice" was organized, and how posters can be used to educate, agitate, and inspire people to action.

For over ten years, hundreds of women in the Mexican town of Juarez have been kidnapped, raped, murdered and grotesquely maimed. After years of official apathy and police incompetence towards solving and ending these brutal murders, a group of graphic designers from Mexico City invited colleagues to express their concern and outrage by designing posters around the slogan "The Woman of Juarez Demand Justice." A powerful exhibition of more than 60 large-format images by designers from all over the country was first staged in a Mexico City metro station, where they were seen by huge numbers of people who may not often visit museums and galleries. The exhibition is currently traveling throughout Mexico, educating about the murders and forcing authorities to become involved.

Suggested donation: $5.00. No one turned away for lack of funds. No reservations necessary.

More information on the web site of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, who sent me the above announcement.

Graphic Design for the 21st Century: 100 of the World's Best Graphic Designers is a book published last year by Taschen. If you are curious whom the authors consider to be among the 100 best, you can look up the table of contents of the book in the amazon.com link above. About half of them I have never heard of, but maybe they don't design posters?

The Saul Bass exhibition at the Design Museum in London opened on July 17, 2004.

Poster competition for german students on the subject 'Die Zeit ist reif' - 15 Jahre friedliche Revolution. Deadline is July 31, 2004.

Rock'n Roll will never die is the title of an article by Fons Hickmann on the eternal question if the poster is dead. The article appeared originally in Novum magazine and is reprinted from the ICOGRADA website.

The German Federal Governement has called a student poster competition on poverty in support of a United Nations resolution to cut the number of poor people in half by the year 2015. The winners have now been selected (jury president Uwe Loesch), and the posters can be obtained by schools and public institutions as a traveling exhibition.

Otto Mittmannsgruber and Martin Strauss have become known by their special kind of posters that purposely leave people confused as to what they are supposed to buy or who is paying for the advertisement. Their type of public art is still looking for a catchy name, but in the meantime they have an exhibition Kampagnen ohne Auftrag. Kunstprojekte in Massenmedien 1994-2004 at the MAK in Vienna, 9.6.2004 - 12.9.2004, complete with a catalogue.

Andrea Rauch is a prominent italian graphic designer and one of the editors of SocialDesigneZine. See the political posters on his web site.

List of posters received by the Golden Bee Biennale in Moscow.

A gigantic BIG MAK poster in the center of Moscow raised some eyebrows at the russian design magazine KAK

Dios es Argentino (God is Argentinian) is a popular expression in that country, and also the name of an exhibition of about 60 posters by young argentinian designers at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Barcelona, Spain, from July 9 to 30, 2004. I found this item at SocialDesigneZine, a rich and inspiring italian source of graphic design news.

ICOGRADA announced yesterday that a new Graphic Design and Typography Center is planned in Havana, Cuba, "where designers can exchange Cuban posters for those of other countries", among other things.

The Wanda Siemaszkowa Theater in Rzeszow, Poland organizes two biennial events alternating with each other: The International Biennale of Theater Posters and The International Computer Art Biennale. In 2004, it is the turn for the computer artists (although many poster designers have participated in the past in this category with computer generated posters), and the call for entries has just been published.

Fifteen black and white theater posters from Gunter Rambow are shown in the online version (July 2004) of the french graphic design magazine Etapes

Sven Brasch - danish poster designer - 1886-1970. A book was published about him last year which you can order from this web site.

Marian Nowinski's new web site

Ausstellung Anschlaege gegen Rechte Gewalt im PAN KUNSTFORUM NIEDERRHEIN. Ein Plakatwettbewerb der AGI Alliance Graphique Internationale an den deutschen Hochschulen. 16. Juli - 19. September 2004

A poster competition to promote girl's soccer in in Somkhele, KwaZulu-Natal (ZA)

La Maquina del Tiempo is the name of an informal group of mexican graphic designers:

Alejandro Magallanes

Andres Mario Ramirez Cuevas

Roxana Ruiz

Julian Herrera

Leonel Sagahon Very political, very strong, very beautiful!

Wladyslaw Pluta had an exhibition of his logos, posters and books at the Gallery Bunkier Sztuki in Cracow, Poland. They published a nice catalogue, for which Krzysztof Lenk wrote an interesting article, starting with the thunderous sentence The line of wisdom in poster art, the Trepkowski-Urbaniec-Pluta line, shines with a refined, dim glow among the orgy of colors and the cacaphony of injured faces, ropes stretched through the eyes and nose, sad Pinokio's, half naked fat women with worms crawling out of their breasts - that kitsch repeated into infinity, flooding us over the past years. (news from Krzysztof Dydo)

My son Andres would like to call your attention to the 2.ter internationaler Pixelstorm-Award.

Exhibition by swiss graphic designer and photographer Werner Jeker at the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne (CH).

"Back From the Dead, Minutes after the end of Seattle's evil poster ban., posters and flyers of all kinds were slapped up on telephone poles all over town. Art critic Emily Hall gets excited and tells us what she thinks." The article above is already two years old, but a relief nevertheless.

Roman Kalarus will have a poster exhibition at the Pigasus Gallery in Berlin, July 17 - July 31, 2004, opening on Friday, July 16 at 2000.

Roman Cieslewicz, les années M.A.F.I.A, 1969-1972 is an exhibition at the Musee de la Publicite in Paris, from May 12 to September 5, 2004.

Danish election posters, with an artistic touch!

The cuban poster: A retrospective is an exhibition at the Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica CA (US), July 10 - August 7, 2004.

Lots of Shigeo Fukuda posters at the website of his exhibition in Macao earlier this year.

There is an exhibition The Golden Years of the Tennis Poster 1890-1940 at the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum in Wimbledon (GB).

Swann Galleries in New York has a vintage poster auction on August 4, 2004.

HOW Magazine International Design Competition 2004, deadline 2004.09.15 includes a category posters.

The traveling exhibition on Lucian Bernhard is now in Asuncion, Paraguay.

There is a new book about Niklaus Troxler, not only about his posters, but mostly about his Jazz festival in Willisau, Switzerland (which can hardly be separated from his poster work anyway): Jazz in Willisau - Wie Niklaus Troxler den Free Jazz nach Willisau brachte (in german). It is an excellent book, well written in clear language, full of details, describing the highs and lows of the festival that is now entering its 30th year. It is therefore also a very personal story about Troxler, his family, his friends and his life.

Zoe Whitley, the curator of the Schreyer Collection at the poster departement of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London recently wrote me about her collection: We are only slowly in the process of making the collection accessible online. Over the next year, I hope to research and catalogue a substantial segment of the Schreyer posters. Only a minimal portion of the Schreyer Collection has yet been photographed, but I will see whether or not any of those images can be uploaded for your site. For information about the collection in general, the best source of printed information is the book by Margaret Timmers, my senior curator, which you already have listed on your poster bibliography. (The Power of the Poster). Within our Department, posters were actively collected from the early 20th Century. The widow of pioneering poster collector Joseph Thacher Clark gave the V&A in 1921 all of the posters he had collected throughout his lifetime. This gift immediately made the V&A a poster collection of international standing, with work represented by all the major poster deigners up to that time. In 1931, the V&A hosted a display of more than 650 British and foreign posters in the Museum's North Court. This exhibition sparked further acquisitions, which continues up to the present day. Most of our posters come as gifts while others have been bought from individuals, institutions or at auction. Nearly half of the poster collection is British and the other half represents other nationalities. We collect the poster as an art form (with fine examples by Cappiello, Tolouse-Lautrec, Mucha, Cheret, etc.); the poster as a social document (how goods and services were advertised at particular times, e.g. Post Office or Shell Oil); and the poster as an instrument of propaganda (Mai 68 student posters, Black Panthers, Spanish Civil War, Feminist Movement). After the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted 'The Power of the Poster' exhibition in 1998, the British Museum offered to transfer its entire collection of posters to the V&A in order to rationalise the national collections. Secondly, we were offered an amazing collection of nearly 3, 000 posters from a private collection in New York in 1999 - the gift of Leslie, Judith and Gabri Schreyer and Alice Schreyer Batko. Because of this, what was initially a holding of approximately ten thousand posters in the Collection of Prints and Drawings has quickly risen to nearly sixteen thousand in our recently restructured Word & Image Department. The Schreyer collection in particular began during Leslie and Alice's student days in the 1960s. The collection they amassed is international in origin and interest and dates from the 1890s to the 1980s. Collecting posters became a catalyst for learning about design and about the history of the century. The holdings include now-rare posters from the Weimar Republic, the Russian Civil War and 1960s counter culture. Virtually every political event of the Twentieth Century is represented: The First and Second World Wars, Spanish Civil War, Mao's Cultural Revolution, anti-imperialist struggles of developing nations, the Vietnam War... For additional information see Schreyer Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum