BY PAUL SCHINDLER | Going back more than 100 years, the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum, examines the variety of ways in which poster artists have employed basic principles of composition, visual perception, and storytelling to create their work.
The exhibit, which runs through January 24 and includes more than 125 pieces from the museum’s permanent collection, is organized according to 14 different approaches to poster-making: focus the eye, overwhelm the eye, use text as image, overlap, cut and paste, assault the surface, simplify, tell a story, amplify, double the meaning, manipulate scale, activate the diagonal, make eye contact, and make a system.
In an online skillshare.com class running just over one hour, curator Ellen Lupton offers insight into how poster artists use “language and visual communication to excite the eye, to tell stories, to convert a complex image into something really powerful and compact.”
