ANNOUNCING: 'RE-READING THE GRAPHIC DESIGN ARCHIVE / RE-FRAMING THE GRAPHIC DESIGN COLLECTION', SPRING 2025, UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
A 6-week course at the University of Amsterdam: ‘Re-reading the Graphic Design Archive/Re-framing the Graphic Design Collection’, will be taught by prof. dr. Alice Twemlow, the Wim Crouwel professor for Graphic Design History.
The course is offered to UvA Masters students from all disciplines and students from other academies and universities by application. It is also open to members of the Wim Crouwel Institute community such as practicing designers, educators or writers who would like to learn more about the histories of graphic design, with a focus on the archive, the collection and the exhibition as modes of knowledge production.
‘Re-reading the Graphic Design Archive/Re-framing the Graphic Design Collection’
University of Amsterdam
Tuesdays, 12:00-15:00
11 February - 25 March, 2025
To learn more and to sign up, contact the Wim Crouwel Chair Dr. Alice Twemlow.
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PROFESSOR BY SPECIAL APPOINTMENT IN THE WIM CROUWEL CHAIR AT UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
In 2021 Dr. Alice Twemlow was appointed as the endowed professor/Wim Crouwel Chair in the History, Theory and Sociology of Graphic Design and Visual Culture in the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam.
This new position, the ‘Wim Crouwel Chair’, was established by the Wim Crouwel Institute (WCI), a foundation dedicated to making the rich heritage of Dutch graphic design widely accessible for research and education. Dr. Twemlow continues her role at the University of the Arts in The Hague (KABK).
Dr. Alice Twemlow is internationally recognized for her work as a scholar, educator and critic and her active engagement in many aspects of contemporary design culture. Her historical research has focused on design criticism, waste, and consumption of graphic design. She also investigates the relationship between design and time, experimental publishing, critical and speculative design and the nature of design and artistic research and methodologies.
She is currently Research Professor (Lector) at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, where she heads the ‘Design and the Deep Future’ research project. Previously, she was head of the Master Design Curating & Writing at the Design Academy Eindhoven. And prior to that, she founded an MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
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GRAPHIC DESIGN IN THE UNIVERSITY
The Wim Crouwel Chair is part of the Faculty of Humanities (UvA). There Twemlow contributes to the educational offering with lectures and seminars on the history, theory and sociology of graphic design and visual culture, available to all master students. In addition, Twemlow supervises MA theses, and doctoral trajectories. She conducts and disseminates her own research related to the graphic design archive, and represents the professorship in international research networks.
The endowed chair is of great importance to the Wim Crouwel Institute, because, to date, in the Netherlands, the history, theory and sociology of graphic design and visual culture have been insufficiently represented as subjects of scientific inquiry at the university level. Following in the footsteps of its namesake the pioneering Dutch designer Wim Crouwel, the Wim Crouwel Institute wants to encourage rigorous academic research into graphic design and thereby to enhance the visibility and relevance of this discipline in the Netherlands and internationally.
The chair was created in collaboration with the Faculty of Humanities and Allard Pierson of the University of Amsterdam and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The graphic design collections of both institutions will be frequently used for educational and research purposes within the framework of this chair.
The endowed chair has been made possible by financial contributions from the General Social Fund for the Graphic Industry and the Pictoright Fund. The Association of Dutch Designers (BNO) wholeheartedly supports the chair.
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THE INAUGURAL LECTURE BY PROF. DR. ALICE TWEMLOW
DISQUIETING HISTORIES: NOTES ON SILENCE IN THE GRAPHIC DESIGN ARCHIVE
The lecture was held in the UvA Aula on December 1, 2022. After the lecture and reception the discussion continued in the 2022 edition of the Wim Crouwel Institute’s ‘It’s All Graphic’, held at Pakhuis de Zwijger, and devoted to an exploration of the role of graphic design in problematizing the archive.
Read the full inaugural lecture here or watch the recorded livestream.
The inaugural lecture was part of the base-camp-preparation for a research project which seeks better understanding of the role of design history in negotiating the relationship between graphic design as heritage and graphic design as contemporary professional practice. It leans on perspectives and dispositions derived from decolonial aesthesis and intersectional feminism being used to question and disrupt representational biases and imbalances in cultural heritage preservation, generally, and explores how such theories and tactics might also support renewed attention to the graphic design archive, specifically.
With reference to Saidiya Hartman’s notion of critical fabulation and Rolando Vázquez’s advocacy for practices of listening and relationality, the project wants to posit a range of ways in which the design historian, as the intended consumer of an archive, might critically intervene in its mechanisms of collection and description, and thereby participate in the collective effort to unsettle some of the normative assumptions that have accreted around the archive.
Working with students, PhD candidates and colleagues at UvA, Professor Twemlow hopes that more just and inclusive pathways can be walked between the past, present and future of graphic design practice and its cultural historical interpretations.
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