The gallery guide was available for free in the galleries, and the campaign spanned from posters to online applications.
Painter Painter is an exhibition at the Walker Art Center of 15 young contemporary painters from the United States and Europe. It serves as a conversation on the practice of painting and studio culture, and how artists find complex potential in a medium bound by the four simple corners of a rectangle (that is, when they are rectangles). One of the painters in the show, Alex Olson, describes the marks she makes on her paintings as signifiers, visual gestures that suggest many things, both within the history of painting and also in daily life. For the rest of us, we employ marks everyday in language, using commas, periods, exclamation marks and more to define things like the rhythm of a sentence, the tone of language, the character of voice; heavy tasks for things that are basically loops, dashes, and dots. With this in mind, the identity and campaign of the exhibition centered around these “ditto marks,” to reference the repetitive title of the exhibition, the mark of an artist, and the constantly open-ended nature of painting and communication. The identity, a collaboration between Sang Mun and Dante Carlos, was applied to all exhibition graphics and a 24-page gallery guide, which also carried over to posters, printed matter, and advertisements. A brand system was also developed for secondary content in the form of live lectures and interviews (Studio Talks), blog posts (Studio Sessions), and a even a CD of music picked by artists for the exhibition available at the Walker Shop (Studio Mix).
The curators were satisfied with the design, and how the branding system allowed these disparate programs to unify and reinforce the message of what contemporary studio practice is.