Ellia Hamabuchi
Posters for Parsons School of Design
Prompt: Taking inspiration from Sister Corita Kent’s 10 Rules, as well as the artwork you are exploring in Studio and Seminar, we will investigate the creative potential of rules, constraints, and limitations on a creative practice. Process: Choose an artist (in my case Lester Beall) from the list you got in studio. Draw the artwork (Posters for the Rural Electrification Administration) and come up with 5 or more questions that the work provokes. Use these questions, your observations of the formal and conceptual qualities of the work, and your own interests to create a framework of “rules” to follow for yourself this week. Make one work a day.
Inspired by Lester Beall’s (1903-1969) Rural Electrification Administration Posters, I created these six posters to represent the vices that are often utilized by a wide variety of students at Parsons.
My rules for this piece were:
1. Rely on and utilize posters to spread information quickly to wider audiences.
2. Express gratitude for what you’ve accomplished yourself, and with help.
3. Restrict your color palette to those that come from where you grew the most.
With this, I leaned towards illustrating the vices that students at Parsons utilize to get through art projects late at night, to wake up early for 9 AM classes, and in general, live. Through this piece, I explored themes of substance abuse, caffeine addiction, and a general blindness towards these vices for the success that it brings as a byproduct. While there exists a population of students that do not use any of these to get through their days, I find that almost every person uses at least one, to help them in trying to succeed in what many call an oversaturated and underfunded field. The color palette, typography, and iconography that I utilize in these posters are meant to resemble the Parsons design language. Using the official The New School branding guideline booklet, I composed these posters to reminisce both the iconic Parsons School of Design aesthetic and the simplicity of Lester Beall’s Rural Electrification Administration posters.