My dissertation explores the relationship between graphic design and art by investigating their intersection at a pivotal time in their history: the long decade between the 1959 “creative revolution” in advertising and the release of the Massimo Vignelli-designed New York City subway map of 1972. During the course of my examination, I reveal that, far from remaining mutually exclusive, or from engaging in a one-way connection through which high art drew on mass culture, as is often assumed, art and graphic design regularly informed each other’s methods of production.
Although it is well known that artists such as Andy Warhol appropriated advertising imagery, there are also instances in which artists and designers employed street signage to navigate through city streets and artistic compositions, or moments during which both designers and artists undertook to follow unwitting pedestrians, that signal a deeper understanding of the sympathies between design and art strategies than simple visual borrowing. With these aspects in mind, my dissertation involves the work of artists who have not often been discussed in terms of design, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Hans Haacke, as well as designers such as Milton Glaser and Peter Chermayeff who debated the efficacy of designed objects in a city of such overwhelming visual stimulation. My research reveals a city in crisis, but one that provided opportunities for artists and designers to develop new means of improving and disrupting its ways of living. In surveying this time and art and design’s mutual influence, I hope to pose new questions of designed objects as well as of the art world that developed alongside them.