Tuesday, 5:35am
7 May 2013
Letterpress firecracker in Tribeca
Eye magazine presents an evening with typographer, designer and letterpress practitioner Alan Kitching in Tribeca on Wednesday
On Wednesday evening there’s an opportunity to see designer and typographer Alan Kitching (of The Typography Workshop) giving a talk at the Skyline Studios in Tribeca.
Tribeca Skyline Studios, 205 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10013 (part of Pencil to Pixel). Time: 7-8.30pm. Admission is free via Eventbrite, but space is limited.
Kitching has had a long and prolific career in since he started as an apprentice compositor at a printer in Darlington, and he’s collaborated with an impressive roster of typographers, artists, editors and designers, including Anthony Froshaug, Omnific, John McConnell, Celia Stothard and Mark Porter. One of his latest works is a typographic map of Greenwich Village – a mural commissioned by Pentagram’s Luke Hayman.
Omnific’s Derek Birdsall once wrote this tribute to Kitching:
‘The best thing I did in my brief stay at the RCA was to ask Alan to take over the letterpress department. He did this with great flair, infecting the whole college and introducing several generations of students to the beautiful craft of letterpress printing, keeping it alive and transforming it into a new art form.
‘Twenty years ago, through his brilliantly conceived typography workshops, he breathed on the dying embers of letterpress, re-igniting them into a firecracker.’
Kitching’s Wednesday evening talk is part of the ‘Pencil to Pixel’ exhibition organised by Monotype, which includes items from the archives of Linotype and ITC as well as type drawings, photographs, type and publications from the Monotype archive in Salfords, England.
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