Berkeley Bonaparte was a Bay Area poster art company founded in 1967 by illustrators Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Stanley Mouse, and Wes Wilson. The “Big Five,” as they came to be known, had developed a following designing posters to advertise local rock concerts, promoted by Bill Graham, at the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom…
Artist, activist, and philanthropist Keith Haring produced most of his “flying saucer” drawings well before his work became an international pop culture touchstone. In the summer of 1980, Haring was at a crossroads, and his life and art, he said, “went totally berserk”…
Of the many cultural tributaries that flowed together into what we now think of as the visual aesthetic of the 1980s, one of the most prominent must be the Memphis Group. Convened in 1981 by Austrian-born architect and designer Ettore Sottsass, Memphis was a collective that—incongruously, for something that seems so violently of its times—took its name from the lyric of a Bob Dylan song…
La Longue Marche (The Long March) was completed in 1974, two years after Le Parc refused a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris (according to legend, the decision was based on a coin toss). The work consists of 10 separate but integrated panels featuring interweaving braids of vibrant prismatic color, and stretches to more than 65 feet in length…
The International Typeface Corporation was a private company founded in 1970 to take typesetting out of the physical, metal-setting world and into more “virtual” spheres like filmsetting and the nascent world of computer typesetting. For a quarter-century starting in 1973, ITC released its own print journal, called Upper & Lower Case, or U&lc…
Drive down a fairly benign, suburban road in southeast Houston, Texas, and you’ll pass the parking lot that once housed the BEST Products showroom known as Indeterminate Facade. Located at 10765 Kingspoint Road, the still-hanging-in-there Almeda Mall is nearby, along with a shuttered public library building…
The promotional artwork used on genre film posters, and later on VHS packaging, was often more important for establishing a foothold in the popular imagination than the films themselves. This was especially true in the Italy of the 1980s, where a thriving and competitive cinema industry was increasingly looking to the opportunities offered by foreign markets and the burgeoning home video trade…
Ocean Pacific was founded in 1972 by Jim Jenks, a San Diego-based surfboard maker and former sportswear rep. He had developed the logo in 1969 for a surfboard line, but found much greater success with surfwear, OP’s corduroy “walkshorts” becoming an immediate hit with surfers and, in short order, men everywhere (the high-waisted style was popularized by Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I.)…
Three of the five ads above were illustrated by Ryo Ohshita, who seems to have specialized in depicting the pioneering audio systems of the time. Clearly taking after one of the most sought-after futurist illustrators of the decade, Shusei Nagaoka, Ohshita’s shimmering visions lend his products an occult grandeur and mystery reminiscent of the hovering Monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey…
In 1976, the year after the death of Spanish military dictator Francisco Franco, Barcelona publisher Ediciones Martínez Roca launched its Colección Super Ficción series—an eclectic selection of science fiction novels—with Los Hijos de Nuestros Hijos, a Spanish translation of Clifford Simak’s Our Children’s Children…
