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Chicago
in the 1960s was an exhilarating place for Garland
Kirkpatrick to grow up. The dichotomy of the city's racial politics
and its sublime architecture had a profound impact on him from an
early age and helped drive him toward a career in design. "It was a
big hick town with deep color lines," Kirkpatrick recalls, a place
populated by "austere modern and prairie-style architecture." It
was the era of the 1968 Democratic convention, the Chicago 8 trial,
the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Those experiences
planted the seeds that would later give life to Helvetica Jones,
Kirkpatrick's current design practice formed in service to the
communities and cultural institutions of his adopted home, Los
Angeles.
Kirkpatrick's mother,
Dorothy, was an educator, nurse and
community activist who had a deep interest in Chicago's history.
Through her influence, and that of his middle school teacher Robert
Erickson (Erickson was one of the first graduate students at the
Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology and
founder of a design foundation for the University of Chicago Lab
School, where Garland attended), Kirkpatrick had visited a number
of Frank Lloyd Wright residences in the Chicago area by the time he
was 12. "The Robie House was five blocks from where we lived in
Hyde Park. I remember once having a snowball fight on the
cantilevered porch," he says.
On
his chosen profession and family support:
My father wanted me to be a doctor. Thank god for my mother, who
had a broad appreciation for design and the arts.
It was not until after he graduated from
Amherst College—with a
BA in English in 1983—that Kirkpatrick took a career in design
seriously. While briefly working as an editorial assistant for St.
Martin's Press in New York, he came to a realization. "I worked in
the Flatiron Building, collating hundreds of pages of manuscript
edits like Melville's character in Bartleby, the Scrivener.
Trafficking a galley to the graphic artist piqued my interest in
book-cover design," he says. Kirkpatrick traded his low-wage job
for a Eurail pass and traveled through Europe, where "design seemed
baked into the culture... design was an authentic profession, like
a doctor or lawyer."
He returned to
Chicago and enrolled in the master's program at
the Institute of Design. He connected with the Chicago design
community, interning first with the product design firm Goldsmith
Yamasaki and Specht, and then publication designer Don Bergh. In
1987 he attended Yale's summer graphic design program in Brissago,
Switzerland, where he had his first taste of working directly with
modernist design pioneers Armin Hofmann, Paul Rand and Richard
Sapper. "I remember Paul Rand saying, 'You don't need a belt
and suspenders to hold up your pants.' Anything extraneous
to the design had no place in it." That did it for him; Kirkpatrick
then transferred to the MFA program at Yale.
Kirkpatrick was one of two African Americans
in the Yale
program, following notable graduates Eli Kince, Sylvia Harris and
Saki Mafundikwa. He remembers loving the nuts and bolts of design,
but the experience wasn't everything he hoped it would be. "Like
most students I was looking for some kind of 'design truth,'" he
says. "At that time going to Yale was like a living history where
projects involved icons like Hofmann, Rand, Bradbury Thompson and
others. But there was no critical discussion of either the African
roots of modernism or the cultural impact of design."
Has racism limited him?
Institutionally and demographically, yes. Individually, no.
Credentials and a Scotch-Irish slave name have sometimes helped me
get in the room. Of course I'm glad I haven't been stopped by the
police recently.
Unlike
so many of his peers, Kirkpatrick didn't want to move to
New York and pursue commercial design work. "After graduate school
I didn't see a place for myself in the profession. I was committed
to working from the margins, if anything," he says.
He headed west instead, to freelance and
teach at a number of
art institutions around Los Angeles, including California State
University, Fullerton; Otis College of Art and Design; and
California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he was hired by
designer Lorraine Wild to teach in the school's legendary design
program. He was on faculty there for 12 years, two of which he
served as program director. "For me CalArts was the nexus of Yale,
Basel and Cranbrook—where aesthetically anything seemed possible
and everything was open to reconsideration. It was a great
reeducation," he says.
On weekends he
ran a design studio out of Watts Towers Art
Center for the neighborhood's youth, through the Community Arts
Partnership at CalArts, a model program bringing art and design
education from the academy into the Los Angeles community. Many of
the students at this art center had gang affiliations or were
reformed graffiti taggers. Kirkpatrick found their skills at
lettering to be a refreshing parallel to the typographic
experiments going on at CalArts. They created design work that
reflected the identity of the Towers, which were built in the 1950s
by Simon Rodia, as well as the surrounding community.
His advice to young designers:
Become a storyteller. Create and design your own content whenever
there is the opportunity.
In
addition to his work as an educator, Kirkpatrick formed
Helvetica Jones, a social-design consultancy in 1995. The concept,
he says, came from the commingling of the ubiquitous typeface and
the Blaxploitation-film heroine Cleopatra Jones. "On a personal
level it was an attempt to reconcile my classical design background
with the politics of my identity," he says. Through this enterprise
he works with artists and museums, focusing on issues of race and
identity whenever possible.
Throughout
his career Kirkpatrick has contributed work for
grassroots efforts, designing for various nonprofit organizations.
He served as the art director for the Center for the Study of
Political Graphics, where he developed its visual identity. His
social graphics have appeared in the independent film Fast Food
Nation and have been exhibited in print collections in the
United States and abroad. He has also curated exhibitions around
design as a social medium, and continues to explore those ideas
both in his research and teachings as associate professor of
graphic design at Loyola Marymount University.
"We all know that design is not a benign
activity," says
Kirkpatrick. "It has the power to inform and also to obscure.
Graphic design has become inseparable from corporate and special
interests. I think there's a huge potential for design to visualize
diverse ideologies and to keep issues alive. The work I'm
interested in concerns the latter."
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