The Walker Art Center and AIGA Minnesota present the 24th edition of
Insights
, the annual design lecture series that brings the world’s leading graphic designers to the Twin Cities to share their work, process, and experience. Insights 2010, at 7 pm Tuesdays, March 9–30, in the Walker Cinema, kicks off with British-born Eddie Opara, a founding partner of New York-based studio Map Office, whose diverse projects include environmental graphics for the Prada Epicenter Store in New York and a project exploring the notion of invisibility at the Studio Museum Harlem (March 9). Subsequent programs feature New York-based designer, author, and entrepreneur Peter Buchanan-Smith, whose career has included work for fashion icon Isaac Mizrahi, musical legends David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Philip Glass, and the band Wilco (March 16); Irma Boom, based in Amsterdam, the youngest laureate to receive the Gutenberg Prize for her body of work (March 23); and Los Angeles-based Stefan Bucher, author of 100 Days of Monsters, which documents his imaginative creatures created for the blog dailymonster.com that begin with just a few drops of ink and a can of compressed air (March 30).
Series tickets for Insights 2010 are $70 ($48 Walker/AIGA members); individual tickets $20 ($15; $10 students). Lectures will be webcast on channel.walkerart.org.
Tuesday, March 9
Eddie Opara
British-born Eddie Opara is a founding partner of the Map Office, a New York–based studio specializing in design, strategy, and technology. Their diverse range of projects includes the development of the motion graphics for the Morgan Stanley building in Times Square and new graphic identities for institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum and the UCLA Architecture and Urban Design School; Web sites for clients such as Architectural Research Office that utilize Map’s content management software MiG; View, a visualization software program, created for advertising agency JWT (J. Walter Thompson) to analyze their client’s brands; and environmental graphics for the Prada Epicenter Store in New York, and Stealth, a project exploring the notion of invisibility, at the Studio Museum Harlem. The recipient of numerous awards, Opara has previously worked at 2×4 in New York and studied graphic design at the London College of Printing and Yale University and has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Columbia University School of Architecture.
http://map.themig.org/
Tuesday, March 16
Peter Buchanan-Smith
Peter Buchanan-Smith is a New York–based designer, author, and entrepreneur whose career has included designing book jackets for Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux; art direction of the New York Times Op-Ed page; creative direction for Paper magazine; and work for fashion icon Isaac Mizrahi, musical legends David Byrne, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and the band Wilco. He is the author of several books, including The Wilco Book, and he has collaborated on many others, including Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style with illustrator Maira Kalman, and Muhammad Ali by Magnum Photographers. His first tome, Speck: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things—which originated as a thesis project at the School of Visual Arts, where he teaches—explores the fascinating lives of ordinary people and commonplace objects. This connection between people and objects is also at the heart of Buchanan-Smith’s latest venture, Best Made Co., a purveyor of bespoke axes that offers not only a finely crafted tool but an entrée into the symbolic world conjured by the object and summoned by its owner (adventure, hard work, balance, and so on).
http://buchanansmith.com/
Tuesday, March 23
Irma Boom
Widely hailed as one of the world’s leading designers, Irma Boom has been making books of conceptual rigor, technical virtuosity, and material inventiveness since founding her practice in Amsterdam in 1991. Boom is the youngest laureate to receive the Gutenberg Prize for her body of work. Among her many design awards and honors is the Leipzig Book Fair’s prestigious designation of Weaving as Metaphor, a book about artist Sheila Hicks, as the “most beautiful book in the world.” Whether by expanding her role as a designer by also acting as editor or archivist, or through experiments with paper, binding, color, typography, and image, Boom’s approach consistently produces books with unique visual and tactile experiences. Her varied clientele includes museums and galleries, such as the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Boijmans Van Beuningen, and de Appel, as well as manufacturers and retailers like Vitra and Camper, organizations such as the United Nations and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and design collaborations with Petra Blaisse of Inside Outside.
http://www.irmaboom.nl/
Tuesday, March 30
Stefan Bucher
As principal of Los Angeles–based 344 Design, Stefan Bucher has worked in the fields of advertising, graphic design, and illustration. He began his career at a young age in his native Germany, redrawing existing ads in need of a design makeover, some of which he sold to the original clients. After studies at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Bucher worked briefly in advertising before striking out on his own as a designer and entrepreneur. He is author and designer of the books The Graphic Eye: Photographs by Graphic Designers from around the Globe and All Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers as well as 100 Days of Monsters, which documents his creations for the blog dailymonster.com. Beginning with just a few drops of ink and a can of compressed air, Bucher transforms these abstract and random blots into fanciful and imaginative creatures. Published through his blog, his monsters have inspired a creative community of contributors—people who have written inventive back stories for his creatures, those helping to build the world’s tallest monster by adding their own piece, or others who participate in his Open Source Monster forum.
http://www.344design.com/
