A colorful design to brighten your day! Kinetics is a mural design from the Kaleidoscope collection of murals and supergraphics by James Seeman. Resembling a colorized barcode, the design may have been inspired by this emerging technology. Patented in the United States in 1951, it took about twenty years for the barcode to become commercially...
A version of this post was originally published on June 4, 2017. This is a repost from an earlier year, but it seemed appropriate for the warm summer weather currently being experienced across the United States. It is called El Sol, or the Sun, and it is printed in primarily cool colors which seems...
This bold graphic work combines text and image in a call for solidarity with indigenous populations and resistance to their continued subjugation. Dominating the print is a depiction of a fearsome Aztec warrior, clad in a traditional jaguar costume and stabbing a prone Spanish soldier. Designer Lincoln Cushing (American, b. 1953) appropriated the image from...
Arches is from the first collection of murals Ilonka Karasz designed in 1948 for Katzenbach & Warren, the New York wallpaper firm for whom she designed almost exclusively. Like the majority of her murals it was printed in the blueprint process, her favorite reproduction process for murals as it captured all the nuances of her...
This promotional brochure for the Trees mural designed by Ilonka Karasz in 1960 contains a lot of information packed in an attractive format. This is printed in the luxograph process which was the same technique used to print the full-size murals. This technique was a blueprint method introduced by Katzenbach & Warren in 1947 for...
I have always been a fan of modernist painter Joan Miró. I admire the naiveté and reductive quality in his work, along with his use of bold colors, and his disregard for perspective. Also the way he overlaps elements in his designs and his use of positive and negative spaces. All of these come to...
This vibrant mural design by Charles Baskerville for A Jaguar Hunt in a Mexican Jungle presents an imagined vision of a lush, foreign environment. Part of a group of studies for the pool house (called the Mexican Pavilion) at the Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Estate, the eight-hundred-square-foot mural transported Long Island residents and guests to a...
Hildreth Meière (1892-1961) was a distinguished Art Deco muralist, painter, mosaicist, and decorative artist often applauded for her defiance of normative standards against the professional success of females. In 1936 she wrote, “It drives me wild to be spoken of as ‘one of the best women artists’. I’ve worked as an equal with men, and...
During the years when America was involved in World War II there was a moratorium on new wallpaper designs as the materials used to make printing rollers and silk screens were all needed for the war effort. This forced manufacturers to continue printing the same designs for years. So when the moratorium ended manufacturers got...
