Poster, California Institute of the Arts

Designer April Greiman was a leader in the 1970s California New Wave design movement. This 1978 poster combines her graphic sensibilities with the photography of Jayme Odgers, also an influential postmodern artist and designer of this era. Perhaps surprisingly, Greiman studied rational Swiss design as a fine arts student, traveling to Switzerland to train with masters of that visually spare style. Soon after moving to bustling LA in 1976, she upended the "less is more" convention in favor of a hybrid, layered, multimedia, and decidedly individualized style. She did not completely disregard her training, however; her work maintains order through color, dominant elements, and texture. She describes it as "the Swiss school on acid." Deemed radical at the time, the collages made with Odgers, featuring overlapping images and a play with additional dimensions on the two-dimensional field, anticipated her later work as an early adopter of digital technologies. In 1984, after purchasing a Macintosh computer, Greiman became one of the first designers to experiment with the device, and continued in the following decades to push the boundaries of design, discarding dogma and welcoming possibilities.

Poster, California Institute of the Arts; Designed by April Greiman (American, b. 1948), Jayme Odgers (American, b. 1939); Published by California Institute of the Arts; USA; offset lithograph on paper; 29 x 118 cm (11 7/16 x 46 7/16 in.); Gift of Various Donors; 1981-29-25