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American designer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
April Greiman (born March 22, 1948) is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s."[1][2] According to design historian Steven Heller, “April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital.” “She is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design.”[3] Her art combines her Swiss design training with West Coast postmodernism.[4]
April Greiman | |
|---|---|
April Greiman (2024) | |
| Born | March 22, 1948 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Designer |
| Known for | One of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool |
| Notable work | Design Quarterly #133: Does it Make Sense?, Pompidou, MOMA, LACMA, SFMOMA, 1986 |
| Website | aprilgreiman |
Greiman finds the title graphic designer too limiting and prefers to call herself a "transmedia artist". Her work has inspired designers to develop the computer as a tool of design and to be curious and exploratory in their design approach. Her process includes typelayering, where words and letters are sandwiched and layered, but also appear to float along with other 'objects in space' such as: color swatches, illustrations, lines, mapping, photographs, shapes, among other visual assets. She creates a sense of depth and dynamism, in particular, by combining graphic elements through making extensive use of Apple Macintosh technology.[4] Los Angeles Times called her graphic style "an experiment in creating hybrid imagery."[5]
Born on March 22, 1948, metropolitan New York, April Greiman grew up in Wantagh, Long Island and later Woodcliff Lake, NJ. Her father was an early computer programmer, systems analyst at Lightolier where he introduced the first main-frame computer into Lightolier's business, and later, founder and president of The Ventura Institute of Technology.[6] Her mother, Renee, was a dancer and dance teacher in collaboration with the Fred Astaire Dance Studio. Her only sibling, Paul, became a meteorologist and specialist in climatic and atmospheric interplanetary modeling.[7]
From 1966-70 Greiman was an undergraduate at the Kansas City Art Institute, and studied graphic design, photography and ceramics. In 1970-71 Greiman continued her postgraduate studies at the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule Basel, now known as the Basel School of Design (Schule für Gestaltung Basel) in Basel, Switzerland (1970–1971). As a student of Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart, and she was influenced by the International Style and by Weingarts' introduction to the style later known as New Wave, an aesthetic that moved away from a Modernist heritage.[8]
During the 1970s, she rejected the belief, among many contemporary designers, that computers and digitalization would compromise the International Typographic Style; instead, she exploited emergent technologies and the Basic Chance Principle[9] as integral parts of digital art, a position she has held throughout her career.
After completing her postgraduate studies in Switzerland, Greiman moved to Philadelphia and became an Associate Professor at the Philadelphia College of Art, (now known as University of the Arts)[10] and worked as a freelance designer in Philadelphia and New York City. Utilizing her aesthetic that "...blends technology, science, word and image with color and space...".[11][12] Greiman worked on projects with Emilio Ambasz, Curator of Design at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1976 Greiman moved to Los Angeles, after a brief stint as a freelancer with a corporate design agency in Century City, and established the studio, April Greiman, Inc.[13] and became a leading figure of the emergent California New Wave.
Upon Greiman's relocation from New York City to Los Angeles, she met designer-photographer Jayme Odgers, who became a significant collaborator. In 1978 they designed a famous Cal Arts poster that became a seminal design of the California New Wave.[14][15] They also collaborated on a poster design for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. In 1981 they created an iconic poster of running legs silhouetted against a square of bright blue sky that was published in 1982 in advance of the 1984 Olympics.[16]
In 1982, Greiman was appointed Director of the design department at the California Institute of the Arts, also known as Cal Arts.[17] In 1984, she lobbied successfully to change the department name to Visual Communications, as she felt the term “graphic design” would prove too limiting to future designers. At Cal Arts she had the opportunity to experiment with new technology where she had access to an analog computer, synthesizer and video equipment set up by the instructor and famed artist, Nam June Paik, and investigated in greater depth the effects of technology in her own work.
Greiman began acquiring her own equipment beginning with a first generation half-inch video camera. This led to working with the Quantel Paintbox. By observing this new and innovative equipment, Greiman applied this knowledge to early low-resolution tools, such as Amiga and Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer Inc.).
An early adopter of computer technology, as noted in Apple's Mac @ 30 video,[18] in February 1984 in Monterey, California, Greiman attended the first TED Conference, or Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference that featured several notable speakers including demos of the compact disc, co-developed by Philips and Sony, and one of the first demonstrations of the Apple Macintosh computer by Alan Kay which inspired her to acquire her first computer, the Macintosh computer.[19][20]
In 1986, Greiman was invited by The Walker Art Center to produce Issue 133 of Design Quarterly entitled: Does It Make Sense?[21][22] The edition was edited by Mildred Friedman and published by the MIT Press & Walker Art Center. Using MacVision, a combination hardware/software interface to digitize still frames from a video camera or VCR,[23] Greiman re-imagined the magazine as a fold-out artwork. The nearly three-by-six foot print carefully unfolds three times across and nine times down revealing a life-sized image of Greiman's outstretched naked body adorned with symbolic images and text. Does It Make Sense? was a provocative gesture, which "emphatically countered the objective, rational and masculine tendencies of modernist design," Greiman has said about the artwork's unusual format and title, "the sense it has for me is that it’s new and yet old,… it’s a magazine, which is an artwork, which is an object, which is… crazy.” Does It Make sense? also launched the Walker Art Center's new Everyday Art Gallery[24] and part of many institution and museum collections.[25]
In 1988 in MacWorld's[26][circular reference] First Annual Mac Masters Art Competition, Greiman was awarded Fine Arts First Prize (A) for her Pacific Wave Sculpture,[27] a project produced for the Fortuny Museum in Venice, Italy, for the museum's Pacific Wave Festival, an exhibition celebrating California graphic designers September 27 – December 27, 1987.[28]: 39 Greiman also designed the official poster, Pacific Wave,[29] for the festival, now in several museum collections[30] including LACMA,[31] and featured in The Getty's marketing for 2024 PST ART: Art & Science Collide, an initiative with arts institutions across Southern California.[32]
In 1995, the US Postal Service issued a 32-cent Women's Suffrage commemorative stamp designed by Greiman to commemorate the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Women's Voting Rights).[33] The stamp went on sale nationwide on August 28,1995. The stamp was printed by Ashton-Potter USA, Ltd. (established in 1925 in Canada by the Ashton and Potter families) in the offset printing / intaglio (printmaking) process and is included in the collection of the National Postal Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.[34]
In 1997, Greiman and her husband, architect Michael Rotondi, purchased Miracle Manor, a 1940's motel in the Desert Hot Springs on top of Miracle Hill, with naturally hot and cold mineral springs discovered over 100 years ago. Innovatively restored and turned it into a retreat showcased their three-dimensional design as an oasis of the spirit with "pool and buildings with a purity equal to the desert's."[35] Celebrating the subtle forms and textures of the desert, sky, and waters.[36]
In 2005, Greiman established her current Los Angeles-based design consultancy Made In Space.[13]
Notable projects listed below.
In 1982, Greiman became the Director of the Visual Communications Program of the California Institute of the Arts’ design department.[37] In 1992, she was adjunct faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture until 2009 when she moved on to the Woodbury University School of Architecture until 2018.[citation needed] In Spring 2020, Greiman became a tenured professor of design at the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design.[38]
With four honorary doctorates, April Greiman is seen as one of the "ultimate risktakers" for her unorthodox and progressive approach to design by embracing new technologies.[39]
Collections of the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Centre Pompidou
In 2006, the Pasadena Museum of California Art mounted a one-woman show of her digital photography entitled: Drive-by Shooting: April Greiman Digital Photography.[53] Greiman was also in the major group show at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris called Elle@Centre Pompidou.[54] In 2007, Greiman completed her largest ever work: a public mural, Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice, spanning "seven stories of two building facades marking the entrance to the Wilshire Vermont Metro Station in Los Angeles."[55] In 2014, Greiman collaborated with the London based artist-run organization Auto Italia South East along with a group of artists including Metahaven, in an exhibition POLYMYTH x Miss Information. The exhibition program was included in the external listings for Frieze Art Fair.[56] In 2023 Greiman co-curated with Stacie B. London, and included her artwork in It's About Time, a multidisciplinary group art exhibition of 17 artists at The Brand Library & Art Center, September–November 2023.[57][58]
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