Our thirty-eighth Standing-Room-Only Lecture will have Bruce Kennett coming from where the White River meets the Connecticut River to offer up a nosegay of stencil designs made by W. A. Dwiggins. Although “WAD” is best known for his typefaces and book designs (and for his work with puppets) he was a true innovator in creating pattern and ornament built up from dozens of tiny stencil shapes that he cut in celluloid sheets. In some cases, he generated fairly simple decorations for book spines or running heads, but in others, his playful experiments grew into far more elaborate constructions. Beyond pattern, he employed stencils to create multiple-color pictures for stories he was illustrating, and even utilized them for music notation. Join us for a kaleidoscopic view of Dwiggins’s creative work over a stretch of forty years.
Our speaker, Bruce Kennett, is a designer, photographer, and design historian. His 2018 book, W.A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design, has just been reprinted. He wrote an afterword for a new edition of Stencilled Ornament and Illustration and he recently published (and wrote an afterword for) Dwiggins’s Athalinthia.
Thirty tickets are available for $10 each.
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Date and Time
Friday, May 2 at 7p
Doors open at 6p for mingling.
Place
Katherine Small Gallery
108 Beacon Street
Somerville, MA 02143 [map]
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Standing-Room Only Lectures aim to present short talks about graphic design, typography, and collecting. The lectures are kept to about twenty minutes because—true to its name—the series takes place in our standing-room only gallery. So, wear comfortable shoes and bring a short attention span.