Malcolm Grear Designers, Roger Mayer

From my reviews of the Malcolm Grear Designers exhibit at Rhode Island College's Bannister Gallery and Roger Mayer's “Soundless” at Chazan Gallery at the Wheeler School:

In 1969, Malcolm Grear Designers was hired by New York’s Guggenheim Museum to develop a new graphic identity for the institution. One of the results was a series of posters that boiled down the building’s trademark spiraling architecture into a design of four flat curving stripes that feel like the ideal form of the building that hovers in our minds.

Seen in the exhibition “Inside/Outside: Design and Process, Malcolm Grear Designers” at Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery (600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence, through April 24), the posters remain strikingly fresh. It’s obvious why the image helped lead to the firm doing all of the Guggenheim’s graphic designs — posters, books, invites, signs, gift bags — from 1969 to 1990.

“Inside/Outside” presents a trade show-like retrospective of the work of the Providence graphic design firm, which longtime RISD teacher Malcolm Grear founded in 1960. Here are examples of logos, package design, textbooks, exhibition catalogues, posters, signs, Olympic medals, and museum exhibits that it has produced. And there are plenty of sketches and mock-ups that give glimpses into the firm’s process.

Read the rest here.

“Inside/Outside: Design and Process, Malcolm Grear Designers” at Rhode Island College’s Bannister Gallery, 600 Mount Pleasant Avenue, Providence, through April 24, 2008.
Roger Mayer “Soundless,” Chazan Gallery at the Wheeler School, 228 Angell Street, Providence, through April 20, 2008.