Spring 2019

A century of no, No, NO

WE DISSENT… Design of the Women’s Movement in New York

3 October – 2 December 2018. Cooper Union

An air of discontent has been fomenting in the US since the turmoil of the 2016 Presidential election, and notably in New York City – a metropolis teeming with contradictions.

At the end of last year a small salve to the bitter pill of current political affairs could be found at the Cooper Union, where adjunct art history professor Stéphanie Jeanjean and Alexander Tochilovsky, curator of the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography, co-organised ‘WE DISSENT… Design of the Women’s Movement in New York’. With a selection of roughly 250 prints, publications, posters, artworks and ephemera, the exhibition framed the city’s powerful social history of women’s activism through the lens and medium of graphic design and visual art.

The Cooper Union’s progressive legacy made it an appropriate location for the show, which was installed in a modest basement-level space of the school’s dramatic academic building – a hulking steel and ruptured-façade structure designed by Morphosis in 2009.

[…]

Cover of Ms. magazine, July 1972 by Murphy Anderson and Jack Adler.
Top: ‘No Means NO’, from Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) Blue Dot series, 1992, designed by Bethany Johns.

23. -Ms_Magazine1972

Aileen Kwun, writer and editor, New Year

Read the full version in Eye no. 98 vol. 25, 2019

EYE98

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. You can see what Eye 98 looks like at Eye Before You Buy on Vimeo.