Responses by Rick Heffner; assistant professor, graphic design; George Mason University School of Art.

Background: This exhibition, occurring on the 100th anniversary of James Baldwin’s birth, offers a close examination of the 1964 book Nothing Personal, a collaboration between the writer James Baldwin and the photographer Richard Avedon and designed by book designer Marvin Israel. The book appears at a crucial moment in the history of the US civil rights movement and other social movements of the time, which are detailed in a graphic chronology accompanying the exhibition. Nothing Personal: A Collaboration in Black and White’s design incorporates opportunities for audience interaction and reflection as well as being a backdrop for a series of public programs and workshops. The primary audience for the exhibition is students who want to gain greater awareness of the social climate of 1960s and make meaningful connections to current social issues and movements.

Design thinking: Two copies of the 1964 edition of Nothing Personal have been disassembled, and their original pages have been mounted in sequence on the gallery walls. These original pages were printed by rotogravure, an intaglio printing process where the image is etched onto the surface of a metal plate, holding ink that is pressed onto the paper’s surface. In addition, a selection of images and texts from the book have been enlarged and printed directly onto the gallery walls using innovative vertical wall-printing technology. Biographical information on Avedon’s portraits have been added to the exhibition along with a graphic timeline of the 1960s connecting the flow of ideas, themes and events to those in the book.

Favorite details: This project was truly a collaboration—from the curators, design team, researchers and university contributors. I also love the combination of the relatively old printing techniques of rotogravure with the latest digital wall printing.

New lessons: I learned more about the impactful work of two artists—Baldwin and Avedon—who both addressed issues of identity, race relations, and civil and queer rights in midcentury America. Researching, selecting and installing images for the graphic chronology was particularly inspiring and is a great example of “show, don’t tell.”

Visual influences: Avedon’s exhibition MURALS influenced our use of scale, and his first retrospective in 1962 at the Smithsonian inspired the timeline portion of the exhibition, where he tacked up an array of portraits, fashion photographs and advertising images randomly directly to the wall—unframed, liked he hung his work in his own studio. The team was very interested in how to translate the experience of a book into the gallery space.

masonexhibitions.org