Friends of Katherine Small Gallery (and people paying attention) will know that ours is not an art gallery. But sometimes we make exceptions. We were so taken by type designer Zuzana Licko’s weavings based on her Crackly pattern fonts that we asked if we could have a show of them. (Artists take note: Don’t ask us. We’ll ask you.) Although abbreviated above, the full title of the show is 9 Jacquard Weavings: Intersecting Figures, Faceted Figures, and Isometric Puzzles, and the geometric designs in these jacquard weavings are constructed from Licko’s fonts. The Crackly fonts are composed from straight lines that intersect at various angles, resulting in geometric compositions with imaginary perspectives and optical illusions that welcome interpretation. And they make for striking pieces to hang on your wall.
Zuzana Licko was born in 1961 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, and emigrated with her parents to the U.S. in 1968. She graduated with a degree in Graphic Communications from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. Together with her husband, Rudy VanderLans, Licko started the design company Emigre Graphics in 1984. The company became world renowned for its self-published magazine and type foundry which were greatly inspired by the new technical possibilities offered by the introduction of the Macintosh computer. Licko is the recipient of an honorary Ph.D degree from RISD, an AIGA medal, and she received the 2013 Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados. In 2011, five digital typefaces from the Emigre Type Library were acquired by MoMA for their design and architecture collection. And now she has an exhibition at Katherine Small Gallery.