Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism

The first major museum exhibition to survey the relationship between architecture and the environmental movement in the United States, Emerging Ecologies brings together a wide range of innovative and daring projects spanning six decades.

Inspired in part by the smoky yellow skies in New York in June of 2023 the day of our initial design review, the main exhibition color on the title wall is in piercing yellow, expressing the urgency of the works on view and the rapidly accelerating climate crisis.

Featuring the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, James Wines, and many others.

New Ground: Jacob Samuel & Contemporary Etching

A Master Printer's Farewell.  What makes a 500-year-old printing process new? Master printer and publisher Jacob Samuel has brought etchings—prints created by transferring ink from a metal plate to paper—into the 21st century through collaborations with more than 60 contemporary artists.

Some of the artists had never made prints; others had hated the process. But with Samuel’s guidance, they all adapted this historic technique to their artistic visions. New Ground: Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching gathers the resulting books and print portfolios to show the flexibility of etching and its reinvention for a contemporary world.

For the exhibition identity, we created a montage of footage from Jacob Samuel in his studio, and painted the wall copper, with overpainted black ink—simulating an Intaglio plate ready to be printed. 

Before Technicolor: Early Color on Film

 The earliest color films were made around 1895, when new, synthetically produced dyes transformed the nature of color in mediums such as postcards, magic lantern slides, and fabrics. For moviegoers and critics of the period, color added to films shot in black and white was an attractive “special effect.” In the decades before Technicolor proved capable of reproducing a full spectrum of colors closer to those of the real world, colorists indulged in the imaginative possibilities of the techniques available to them.

Recalling this “forgotten history,” this gallery installation of nine cinema works from MoMA’s collection introduces a number of early systems that were used to reproduce color on celluloid.

For the exhibition identity, we ultilized a bold geometric sans-serif, a typeface new to the era, signifying technological advances, along with a black and white image that was handpainted in vibrant yellow, embodiying the technique used in coloring early film.