MCAD LIBRARY

VISITING ARTIST LECTURE: APRIL GREIMAN

April Greiman is a thinker, designer, and artist whose transmedia projects, which address all areas and scales of design from communications to textiles and from architecture to new media, together with her innovative use of advanced digital technology, have made her a leader in the design world.

Originally from New York, Greiman studied design and painting at the Allgemeine Kuntgewerbeschule in Switzerland and the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. In 1976, she moved to LA where she established her practice, Made in Space. Her radical visual identity and publication projects for such progressive schools as Cal Arts—where she was chair of the visual communications program 1992–1994—and SCI-Arc are notable for their pioneering use of Mac computers and software, as well as their emphasis on novel video and digital exploration.

Greiman actively challenges interdisciplinary boundaries, investigating the parallels and intersections between art and design in all aspects of her work, which has appeared in print in Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, and USA Today, among others; on television networks including CNN, PBS, and ESPN; and in the books April Greiman: Floating Ideas into Time and Space, Hybrid Imagery: The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Arts, It’snotwhatAprilyouthinkitGreimanis, and Something from Nothing.

Greiman’s work has long had a relationship to architecture and she has collaborated with such renowned architects as Frank Gehry and RoTo architects to produce signage, exhibitions, and color palettes for both interiors and entire building complexes. Her interest in both print and virtual space has led to projects for furniture manufacturer Vitra’s Workspirit Magazine, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, and fashion label Dosa, among others. Greiman’s work has been recognized with numerous awards including the Medal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; the Pompidou Center in Paris, France; and the Library of Congress.

Greiman’s digital photography and transmedia work have been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Visual Arts Museum, School of Visual Arts, NY (2008) and the Pasadena Museum of California Art (2006). In 2007, Greiman completed her largest single work to date: a public art mural, “Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice,” that spans seven stories of two building facades marking the entrance to the Wilshire Vermont Metro Station in LA. In 2011, she had her video-still/offset-lithographed journal, Does it Make Sense, Design Quarterly #133 on display in the Elle@Centre Pompidou exhibition. She is currently at work as colorist and the environmental graphics system for the vast 1400-acre Great Park of Orange County.

Visit the artist’s official site for more info.