Ken gave some good advice to Magie Price-Pietkiewicz re: graphic
design collections.

>The vast majority of collections of all kinds are research
>collections and archives. These tend not to be kept on public
>exhibition. They are generally accessible to scholars on request.
>
>Specialized collections and research collections tend to focus on a
>specific idea, issue, medium, period, designer, manufacturer, artist,
>genre, etc.

In the US there are major general modern-current graphic design
collections at Rochester Institute of Technology and the Cooper
Union. (Cooper Union has one of the great web-displayed collections
anywhere.) The Library of Congress, the Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt,
MOMA and other art museums, the American Institute of Graphic Arts,
and others have general collections of various sorts.

But a comprehensive collection of graphic design would be impossibly
large and probably fairly useless. Imagine a warehouse the size of a
small city full of paper. How would the curators even decide what
should be in the collection? If you limited it to
professionally-designed material you could eliminate lost cat posters
but how about the millions of business cards that have been produced?
Cereal boxes? Tattoo flash?

It would seem that developing some specificity would be the first
order of business. For example, if you were interested in trademark
design (especially American trademark design) Eastern Kentucky
University has the working material for David Carter's many trademark
books. If you were interested in Cuban political posters or the
graphic design for the United Farm Workers, the Center for the Study
of Political Graphics in Los Angeles would be a much more productive
place to visit.

Magie: If you have trouble finding any of the sources I mentioned,
contact me and I'll try to aim you in the right direction but I think
you'll find "graphic design--is it Art?" to be simultaneously both
impossibly large and too small of a topic to be fruitful. The short
answer is "Both 'Art' and 'graphic design' are defined in a wide
variety of ways and, absent specific context, each term is so vague
and/or ambiguous as to be useless. Depending on how you define each,
the answer is either 'Yes' or 'No' or 'Some graphic design is and
some isn't.'"

There are many worthwhile topics of study on the relationship of
specific art movements and graphic design. Go for Fluxus and you
could make Ken your primary source. Seriously, there's an example of
how broad the topic is--you could do a major book just on Fluxus and
its relationship to various definitions of art and the politics of
those definitions.

>Collections that began under ancient names in 1792 or modern
>organizational names 1907 may now house hippie posters from the
>1960s, along with copies of underground newspapers, and a full run of
>Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics.

The Freak Brothers: Now that would be the basis for interesting
research. Start with a Nexus/Lexus search for "Dope will get you
through times without money better than money will get you through
times without dope."

Gunnar
--
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