WHO
Lorraine Wild, founder and creative director of Green Dragon Office in Los Angeles, has long been recognized as a premier book designer and respected academic who cochairs the MFA program in Graphic Design at CalArts. Wild and designer Victoria Lam worked with Lisa Gabrielle Mark, the director of publications at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), to create a catalog for WACK!, the first comprehensive historical exhibition of its type. WACK! features the works of 120 women artists and collaborative groups from around the world in such media as painting, sculpture, photography, film and performance art. The exhibition includes groundbreaking yet little-known artists as well as superstars like Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman and graphic design’s own Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Although not all of the artists are feminists, they are all placed within a feminist context, a strategy that brings life to the exhibition and catalog.

WHAT
WACK! explores both the international foundation and continuing legacy of feminist art. The 520-page catalog is a rich survey that works as a companion to the show in addition to being a chronicle of the impact of the women’s liberation movement that sought to end inequities and discrimination against women because of gender alone. Themes addressing feminist issues include the Body as Medium, Family Stories and Gender Performance, providing an organizing structure for the catalog, which features not only the various artists’ biographical information and images of their work, but essays by leading critics, art historians and scholars. The writings offer fresh observations on feminist art practices from a cross-cultural perspective. “Feminist art is one of the most important movements of the postwar period,” explains Mark. “We knew we were making an important book that would be referred to for a long time to come.”

WHERE
Curated for MOCA in Los Angeles by Cornelia (Connie) Butler—who has since moved on to The Museum of Modern Art in New York—WACK! will travel to Washington, D.C., and then on to New York in 2008. The artists in the exhibition are from the U.S., Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, North Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and represent a truly global perspective. Their art was created for large-scale public spaces as well as private, intimate ones. Given the breadth and variety of the artwork, Lorraine Wild and her team had to rise to the challenge of containing all this material in one book. The WACK! catalog was printed in Germany at Dr. Cantz’sche Drukkerie, Ostfildern.

WHEN
WACK! includes works from approximately 1965 to 1980, but focuses on the crucial apex of the feminist revolution in the 1970s. “We wanted the book to have some reference to the times of the show and to carry some of the messy vitality of the original work into the design,” says Wild of the catalog. “However, the actual work was so visually diverse and active that we found, particularly in the plate section, we had to tame the layout and simplify the typography so as to not compete with the energy in the images themselves. The historical reference turned out to reside mostly in the color palette of papers and inks, using a lot of fleshy, dusty, grayed-back colors and eggplant purple —which I cannot look at without thinking, ‘1972.’” Mark acknowledges Wild’s ability to capture a time and place: “The great thing about Lorraine is that she makes design gestures that are so rich. She captured the era without imitating it.”

WHY
Discussing why the catalog looks the way it does, Wild says, “We deliberately used a very contemporary sans serif font, Auto, which happens to have a couple different options for the italics. One is sort of a standard oblique, and the other one is ornamental and obviously feminine. We started out using the girly one everywhere, but ended up only using it in certain places, because we were trying carefully not to trip over clichés concerning the feminine/feminist. We knew we had to stay away from the Barbie version of femininity and stick with the feminist body instead, which is why fleshy tones predominate, but there is no pink.”

Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution website: www.moca.org/wack
Green Dragon Office: www.greendragonoffice.com