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2004 AIGA MEDAL
Deborah Sussman has worked at the interface of graphic design
and the built environment for more than 30 years. She has created
striking visual imagery and devised its imaginative application for
architectural and public spaces both permanent and temporary,
including the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Seattle's opera house,
and Disney World. Throughout her career Sussman has claimed an ever
more expansive role for graphic design in the urban landscape.
Sussman uses graphic design to emphasize aspects of the built
environment and to provide rich connections to the communities and
cultures in which it will participate.
The 12-by-92-foot carpet she designed for the New Jersey
Performing Arts Center, for example, uses colors and motifs
evocative of African fabrics and painted houses to connect the
Center to the cultural heritage of Newark's predominant
constituency.
In the summer of 1948 Sussman attended a summer school at Black
Mountain College where she received career-defining art and
performance tuition from Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Franz
Kline. She pursued painting and acting at Bard College, NY, and
specialized in graphic design at the Institute of Design in
Chicago. Sussman was invited to join the office of Charles and Ray
Eames, and several years later she won a Fulbright Scholarship to
study at the Hochschule für Gestaltang, Ulm, Germany. During more
than a decade of work with the Eames Office, she worked on the
seminal exhibits for IBM, the Government of India, and the Ford
Foundation. True to the multi-disciplinary approach of the Eameses,
Sussman also participated in designing furniture showrooms, films,
and printed materials.
Sussman began her own practice in 1968 and in 1980 was joined in
business by her husband Paul Prejza, an urban planner and
architect. Sussman/Prejza & Company created and
coordinated a vibrant and playful graphic identity and environment
for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, which was included in
Time Magazine's “Best of the Decade” special issue in
1990. Sussman used sculptural iconography, bunting and balloons in
a fantastic array of vivid hues to transform the Olympic sites
around Los Angeles into visually arresting moments, shrewdly
conceived for televised distribution. The company has also designed
the identity and myriad applications for The Gas Company of
Southern California; the corporate identity, numerous traveling
exhibits, and the interiors for Hasbro Inc. headquarters; and
award-winning way-finding systems for Walt Disney Resorts and the
cities of Philadelphia, and Santa Monica.
Sussman is a former AIGA board member and was the founder of
AIGA Los Angeles.
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“Although environmental graphic design started as architectural
signage—hence, graphics—a flat discipline turned out to be
inadequate in a round world. An exhibition, for example, is more
than a book on a wall or an arrangement of artifacts under glass.
It is the engagement of people as they move through space.
Sussman/Prejza carries this engagement into stores and other public
spaces, and into designed events—a contextual approach that brought
the company international renown with the 1984 summer
Olympics.”
—Ralph Caplan, “Beyond Sussman/Prejza: Jungle Rhythms in
Environmental Graphic Design,” Process Architecture 124,
1994.
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