Alphabet Rendezvous

Tsuneo Taniuchi was born in 1953 in Tanabe, Japan, and now maintains studios there and in Yugawara, near the Izu Peninsula. He moved to the U.S. in 1978, spending most of his time in Boston, working as a designer at WGBH, and later on his own, designing for MoMA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Harvard University; Little, Brown & Company; and Bitstream. He returned to Japan in 1989 where he continued to do design. Alphabet Rendezvous was something he worked on while in Boston. While working on the design of a personal logotype from his initials he came across the idea of combining them into a graphic illusion. This remarkable portfolio of silkscreens features twenty-six illusions, one for each letter of our alphabet. In 1983 this was reproduced in U&lc in black on white whereas here it’s white on black. Black. White. White. Black. Either way it is a very rare and beautiful thing from the collection of Toshi Katayama.