Women in type

A social history of women’s role in type-drawing offices, 1910–1990
A lecture by Fiona Ross and Alice Savoie

Atypi Antwerp
13 September 2018, 9:20am

Fiona Ross and Alice Savoie will introduce a significant new University of Reading research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust that draws on their experiences as type designers and historians. Fiona and Alice will describe how this interdisciplinary research project will provide the first socio-historical analysis of women’s role in the male-dominated British type-manufacturing industry during the 20th century. The project examines the positions women achieved and their responsibilities in the type-drawing offices of the British companies of Monotype and Linotype, at a time when the industry was transformed by external socio-historical factors and significant technological developments. The research team, which includes Helena Lekka, examines this subject in three interrelated ways: in terms of social history; in relation to technological developments; and in terms of contributions to typeface design. The talk will illustrate how, through archival research and interviews, an account can be recorded of the largely overlooked, yet pivotal, involvement of women in the type design process. The research project aims to make a significant contribution to social and design histories, while informing current design practitioners.

More info and tickets on the Atypi website

Image from @alphabettes_org Twitter feed

BEYOND CHANGE

Beyond Change is a conference questioning the role of design in times of global transformations.

22 sessions and workshops addressing topics such as: sustainability, commons, indigenous knowledges, artisanal design, the politics of objects, design and gender, and much more.

+ Building Platforms: An intersectional space for decolonising, depatriarchalising, and deprecarising the conference from within.

During the three days of the conference, the foyer of the HGK FHNW will be inhabited by three design platforms that each problematise the role of design from within the discipline itself: Decolonising Design Group, Depatriarchise Design, and Precarity Pilot. With the aim of fostering an intersectional debate on the politics of design within practice, theory, and academic research – with particular focus on race, ethnicity, gender, and class – the three platforms will collectively activate a given space – a single two-storey scaffold of the kind used in civil construction.

+ Screening: Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, a film by Fabrizio Terranova.

March 8–10, 2018
FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel

Visit the website for more information.

Talk: A Room of One's Own

An illustrated journey through the exhibition Poster Girls by co-curator David Bownes together with author Susannah Walker and Central Saint Martins Lecturer Ruth Sykes, revealing the historical and social context of the times in which key female designers were producing their work.

Thursday 25 January 2018, 7pm
London Transport Museum

Book tickets

Women Designers Conference

ENID MARX AND HER CONTEMPORARIES: 
Women designers and the popularisation of ‘folk arts’ in Britain 1920–1960.

One day symposium, Compton Verney, Warwickshire
Friday 13 September 2013

This event is a collaboration between Manchester School of Art and Compton Verney in Warwickshire, it examines the problematic relationship that objects of material culture associated with the terms ‘folk art’ and ‘vernacular design’ have within debates about artistic value in British visual culture. It concentrates on the re-emergence of an interest in ‘folk art’, especially amongst women designers, in Britain in the first half of the 20th century, and looks at the way that both 'folk art' and particular types of design activity practiced by women have been omitted from traditional historical narratives of art and design.

The curatorial work and collections of women designers and educators during the early half of the twentieth century is one example of what Ellen Lupton calls the 'intangible contribution' women have made to the field of design. Noteworthy names in this respect are; Enid Marx, Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher, Olive Cook, Peggy Angus, Pearl Binder and Barbara Jones. All were design practitioners and private collectors, who found little interest during their lifetimes from the art establishment in legitimising the work their collections centred around. They nevertheless mounted their own small exhibitions and published books and articles to publicise the works to a wider audience (see Myrone, 2009).

These collector/practitioners took creative and practical inspiration from the objects and images as aesthetic and culturally significant designs, but they also had a professional interest in the way that they had been made. Their collections were useful to the women in their profession as designers as well as ‘experts’ and educators. One of the aims of the event is to interrogate the relationship between the 'discerning eye' of the collector and creative practice.

Compton Verney houses the recently redisplayed Marx-Lambert Collection and a collection of Folk Art paintings and objects, which is the most significant single collection of the vernacular arts in Britain, see www.comptonverney.org.uk

International Gender Design Network

A two-day conference on gender and design

The New School

Thursday 28 – Friday 29 March 2013

www.igdn.blogspot.co.uk

Yerim and Her Pink Things from: The Pink & Blue Project (2005)  by JeongMee Yoon

Feminism: Activism: Modernisms

Call for papers

University College Cork, 14–15 September 2012

Deadline: 30 June 2012

Feminism and modernism have long had an uneasy relationship. The feminist position within modernism, an arguably masculinist complex of movements, is an ambiguous and problematic one which is further complicated when it comes into relationship with activism. Throughout the twentieth century, artists and writers aligned with feminism and the women’s movement have engaged with modernist tropes in a variety of ways, employing literary, filmic and artistic practices both to evaluate political positions and to prosthelytize for them. Much of the recent scholarship on these practitioners has neglected to contextualise their output as work that might operate against or within contemporaneous manifestations of feminist activism.

This conference seeks to explore how feminist activism has intersected with modernism and postmodernism in the arts, examining the tensions, connections, and contributions made to modernisms by participants in the women’s movement and by individual feminist activists. Looking at phenomena ranging from early futurist claims for the autonomy of the female practitioner to an artistic and literary engagement with the second wave of the women’s movement, and the relationship between feminism and poststructuralism, this conference seeks considerations of a variety of approaches from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in order to interrogate activist feminism and its relationship to the modernist artworld.

Submit your paper now, more information here or download pdf here

The Bare Facts

The facts say it all... Here is our presentation from the Feminism and Graphic Design conference at Iaspis last week: a data visualisation of gender divisions within graphic design today. It's only the beginning of our research and it's far from complete, so please get in touch if you want to contribute in making this real. 

Designer Breakfasts

Designer Breakfasts – Where are the Women?

Tuesday 20 March, 8 –10am

There are fewer women than men at the top of mainstream design agencies. Attempting to identify reasons for this gender imbalance provokes assumption and generalization best corrected by hearing a range of real case studies.

The panel will draw on their very different experiences and perspectives to test this theory and the validity of commonly held explanations for it – among them the conflicting demands of family and work, the cut-throat nature of traditional business, the wish for a more collaborative and co-operative way of working and the opportunity to create a portfolio career and better work/life balance offered by modern communications technologies. They will also be looking at ways of making the most of all the talent available, male or female, in a world where inclusiveness and openness to change are increasingly important to commercial success.

With Penny Baxter, Nat Hunter, Jack Renwick and Jacky O’Leary.

Design Museum, London.
More info here.

They will put a video online afterwards, so if £26 is a bit pricey, save your bucks for better causes!

Conference

A History of its Own? Graphic Design and Feminism

Saturday 25 February, 12 noon

This free and public seminar includes three talks and a panel discussion about the status of feminism in graphic design today. Unlike the history of art and literature, the history of graphic design has only recently begun scrutinising its canon and methodological underpinnings. This relative youth has allowed it to recognise certain historiographic pitfalls, such as the privileging of biography over collective practices, and of Western European/North American histories. At the same time, as an emerging field, graphic design history may not have registered the impact of the 1960s/70s feminist and queer debates as much as other visual and textual studies. Can graphic design history make up lost time and imagine its history from the ground up? What models from adjacent or distant fields can allow it to fashion a history – indeed a feminist history – of its own? How does or could this reflection on graphic design's recent past shape its current self-perception as a field? How are contemporary women graphic designers in particular representing themselves within it? And what strategies can question and challenge existing historiographic models?

Catherine de Smet will introduce a selection of feminist graphic design practices from the 1960s to today. Hjärta Smärta will share their experience as publishers of the monographic book series on women graphic designers Hall of Femmes, what inspired them to get started, what they are currently working on, and where they will go next. Sara De Bondt and Merel van den Berg will present their research and data visualisation of women in contemporary graphic design.

A panel, moderated by Antony Hudek (Mellon research fellow at University College London and co-director of Occasional Papers) and Sara Teleman (Project Coordinator at Iaspis) will discuss some of the issues raised, and invite the audience to join in the debate.

Iaspis

2nd floor, Maria skolgata 83

118 53 Stockholm

T +46 (0)8 506 550 77 

st@iaspis.se