TOKY was proud not only to be a Gold Sponsor of this past weekend’s Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Gala, but also to design the special event’s collateral. Here’s a look at the central materials, from the invitation mailed out to the official Gala program. With the last photo, you’ll see that our design team used a die cut on the program’s cover to creatively celebrate the man of the hour, former Director Paul Ha.
TOKY HQ is running high on high-fives, having just learned that we’re up for 11 ADDY awards in this year’s St. Louis competition. We’re particularly pleased with how well the range of work represents our firm’s concentrations, from arts and culture (Laumeier Sculpture Park, CAM, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis) to premium products (Panera Bread) to ”world changers,” as we call them (St. Louis Public Library Foundation, Food Outreach). Congrats to the entire TOKY team, and to the clients we worked with on the projects!
Here’s a look at the TOKY work that’s being recognized this year:
1. “Texts in the City” Invitation, St. Louis Public Library Foundation (related blog post)
•
2. Contemporary Fund Mailer, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
•
3. “Share the Season” Packaging, Panera Bread (related blog post)
•
4. stylus box/catalogue, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
•
5. Grab grassy this moment your I’s catalogue, Laumeier Sculpture Park (related blog post)
•
6. 2011 Season Poster, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
•
7. Dreamscapes website, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
•
8. “Design Legends of St. Louis“ Video Series, AIGA St. Louis (one of five videos is shown above)
•
9. “Return to Summer” In-Store, Panera Bread (related gallery at Facebook)
•
10. “Share the Season” In-Store, Panera Bread (related blog post)
•
11. “A Tasteful Affair” Invitation, Food Outreach
•
Our thanks to the ADDY judges who have recognized this work! We’re looking forward to celebrating St. Louis creativity with our colleagues at the February ceremony.
The above shows just one of 10 stories published in last week’s e-newsletter. Read them all here. Want to receive the next one the day it’s published? Join the list today.
I’m thrilled that a project started more than a year ago has finally come to fruition. Sean Landers: 1990-1995, Improbable History is a comprehensive monograph that includes almost all of Landers’ early oeuvre, from 1990 to 1995. A companion to this 2010 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis exhibition, the book provides the first available overview of Landers’ text and cartoon works on paper, his first paintings and sculptures, and video and audio works chronicling his beginnings. I had the pleasure of getting to know Sean and his family during this project and spent two wondrous trips in New York working with him in his studio, fine-tuning every aspect of this catalog.
A few words about the artist and his work from the promotional material accompanying the book’s release:
Since the early 1990s, Sean Landers’ work has been one of the most fascinating and repeatedly irritating projects in contemporary art. The polar opposites of tormented self-doubt and endless self-aggrandizement run like a thread through the artist’s practice along with a number of masks of failure used by the subject as a strategy to preserve himself from impending loser status. This monograph presents an overview of Landers’ oeuvre including text and cartoon works on paper, paintings, sculptures, and video and audio works from 1992 to the present. With text and video works that appear disguised as conceptual art, he introduces into this genre the taboo of the artist as subject, as well as the artist’s emotions. He has become known as the artist who — with confessional and stream-of-consciousness texts and videos — presents himself as a failure in his art, his life and his relationships.
Sean Landers: 1990-1995, Improbable History is a 10 x 13 inch cloth-bound hardback with a wrap-around dust jacket. At 390 pages and including 400 color images, the book is published by JRP|Ringier and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, with the support of Ringier Collection, Zurich. It is distributed in the U.S. through ARTBOOK|D.A.P. and available for purchase here.
Regional readers of this past Sunday’s New York Times found among the hundreds of pages two special inserts recently produced here at TOKY HQ: the latest Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis newsletter and a special announcement for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts‘ upcoming exhibition, Reflections of the Buddha. (TOKY also designed the reception invitation, street banners, and holding-page website for Reflections of the Buddha, but those weren’t bundled in the Times — details to come in a future post.) As readers of these CAM and Pulitzer pieces know, both institutions celebrate openings this Friday. See you there?
We admit it, we’re type geeks.
We love belonging to the Type Director’s Club, and pour over their annual “Best Of” catalogues arguing about new typefaces and posters. It’s a sickness.
So it’s a total geekfest to find out that we have two winners in this year’s TDC57 juried review of the best in typographic design. Our annual holiday cards for the St. Louis Public Library were selected, as was our logo for Mysterios de Mayo for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Our winners from last year’s TDC Show and from 2009 are in our archives. The printed catalogue should be out this autumn.
The opening of Typography 57 was in June at the Cooper Union Gallery in New York City. Sagmeister looks happy.
We love it when projects we really get into get into the Communication Arts Design Annual. This year, we’re pleased that the judges have selected our catalogue for Laumeier Sculpture Park’s Jessica Stockholder show for inclusion.
Marilou Knode and Kim Humphries of Laumeier are wonderful curators, working with Stockholder’s subversive and day-glo work. Knode and Humphries asked us to pair images of Stockholder’s assemblies with poems by Mary Jo Bang; we broke out the Astrobrites, astroturf and assorted gatefolds. The CA Design Annual should be hitting desks around the world next month.
We’ve just received copies of our latest project for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis: Richard Aldrich and the 19th Century French Painting. The 100-page volume, designed by TOKY, is the companion catalogue for the CAM exhibition of the same name, which was on view during the first half of 2011. It was the first solo museum exhibition for Aldrich, a Brooklyn-based artist still in his 30s. The publication includes an introduction by Chief Curator Dominic Molon, as well as essays by Laura Fried, the show’s curator, and Forrest Nash, of Contemporary Art Daily. Reproductions of the artworks are supplemented by photographs of the show’s installation within the CAM galleries.
One especially compelling aspect of the book is that Aldrich has written his own captions for his 20 paintings in the show. Paging through, the reader receives brief personal backstories on how the works were made (pretty interesting information, in Aldrich’s case) and the ways in which he’s nodding to other artists (from Cézanne to Ozu, Bresson to Syd Barrett). Bruce Burton, the TOKY designer (himself an artist) who worked the book, made an interesting comment yesterday about how the literary-minded Aldrich employed those captions—that they were less about the artworks than extensions of them.
Below are two spreads from the book (click each one to see a larger version):
You can pick up your copy of Richard Aldrich and the 19th Century French Painting online at the CAM shop.
Fresh out of the box, Stephen Prina: Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice, is a 36-page hard bound CD booklet designed for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. The booklet is the visual and audio documentation of Stephen Prina’s exhibition and concerto from 2010 at CAM. From CAM’s site:
Simultaneously riffing on classic conceptualism and modernism’s formal tropes, American artist Stephen Prina has, for thirty years, developed a singular and multifaceted practice that encompasses painting, installation, photography, sound, and film. At the same time, he has had an acclaimed career as composer and pop musician—releasing over a dozen music albums under his own name and with The Red Krayola. Having kept his artistic interests separate from his musical pursuits for decades, Prina has begun to synthesize the two endeavors. Presenting recent work in multiple media alongside his music for the first time, Modern Movie Pop considers the role of reprisal in art-making.
The exhibition’s namesake is shorthand for Prina’s newest musical score, a complex homage that combines his own pop songs and soundtracks. Featuring distinguished musicians from Saint Louis, Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice (2010) premieres at the Contemporary. Prina—who often resurrects the motifs of previous projects—has long taken the position that history is always present. Suspending richly painted monochrome window blinds alongside a white carpeted video lounge as “movable stage spectacle,” Prina orchestrates a taxonomy of his art that, at its heart, reveals an attention to the consonant spaces of painting, film, and music.
To get your copy go here: http://camstl.org/shop/stephen-prina-modern-movie-pop
We just wrapped up work for New York’s Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Foundation presents an annual Convening for Museum Professionals; for this year’s event in San Francisco, they came to TOKY for brand identity, conference materials and a website.
The website solution had to allow the Foundation staff to make updates easily and keep attendees immediately informed of developments throughout the Convening. It was also especially important for attendees to be able to share ideas and start a dialogue. At the event, attendees were provided branded conference materials; the challenge of the print portion of this project was to do more with less. TOKY created a comprehensive conference package, enlisting the silk-screen printing expertise of our friends at Cherokee Street’s All Along Press.
View the Warhol Initiative Convening site
Silk-screened folders and letterhead materials.
An online component that will grow post-conference.
Every year, the Music Publishers’ Association of the United States gathers in New York City to award its prestigious Paul Revere Awards. These awards are bestowed in recognition of outstanding examples of overall music publishing, acknowledging publishers for their efforts in all aspects of the publishing process, including design for musical scores.
In this year’s 2011 Awards, the prize-winning cover was our “Ghosts of Versailles” image we produced for G. Schirmer, Inc., in collaboration with the score’s composer John Corigliano. The image is based largely on one of the images we created for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ production of John’s opera.
An exhibit of MPA winning publications will tour throughout next year to libraries, schools, and other institutions around the country.
This one has taken a little while for us to post, because, frankly, we were a little embarrassed by it.
In AIGA St. Louis’ 16th Annual Juried Design Show, TOKY did well. We were honored and humbled that we were given awards for “Best of Show”, “Judge’s Choice” (the only one given to a professional organization), and two “Best of Category” awards. Altogether we took home 18 of the total 43 awards given to Professional organizations (the rest were awards to students).
Best in Show: The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, “Ann Hamilton: stylus” catalogue
Judge’s Choice: Washington University Medical School “Century of Excellence” retrospective book
Best of Category / Branding: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, CAM Rebranding
Best of Category / Books: The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, “Ann Hamilton: stylus” catalogue
Additional Awards:
The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, “Ann Hamilton: stylus” website
Armstrong Teasdale LLC, brand identity
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, “Contemporary Fund” mailer
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, “Mysterios de Mayo” identity
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, website
David Richard Contemporary Gallery, identity (Santa Fe, NM)
Bridge Tap Room, logo and identity materials
Laumeier Sculpture Park, Jessica Stockholder “Grab Grassy Your I’s” exhibit catlogue
Bike St. Louis, “Cranksgiving” poster
Brown School of Social Work, “Social Impact” magazine
Metro, “Core of Discovery” website
St. Louis Public Library Foundation, “Looking Glass” invitation
Schlafly Brewery website
SPACES Gallery (San Jose, CA) identity
Last week was the week of the award shows.
We were very happy to be included in HOW Magazine’s 2011 International and Interactive Design Awards. Three of our museum branding projects for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts were selected, including the “Ann Hamilton: stylus” catalogue (below), the website for the Gordon Matta-Clark exhibit, and the postcards for the “Prisoners at the Pulitzer” performances. We also won for our AIGA 15 Show Call for Entries.
Contact Us
email or
call 314.534.2000
