Exhibition Hours
September 12 @ 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Visit the exhibition, ColleCTomania between 12-4 PM.
About ColleCTomania:
This exhilarating exhibition displaying over 140 Swiss posters from the renowned collector Tom Strong. Strong is a New Haven, Connecticut-based graphic designer, photographer and collector who has spent sixty years amassing, displaying, sharing, and living amongst his archive. The exhibition, curated by Pamela Hovland and Karen Salsgiver, includes a widely diverse range of posters from the 1930s to the present.
Switzerland’s design culture has had a significant influence on the discipline of graphic design. Swiss posters in particular, especially those designed during the 1950s and 60s, have attained iconic status and are part of design education in schools across the globe. Created at uniform scale to be displayed in the streets of Zurich, Lucerne and Basel, these posters are now highly collectible, preserved in the archives of major museums and reproduced in art and design books.
Yale University’s graphic design program, the first in this country, was critical in disseminating the work and ideas of Swiss designers. Several influential practitioners were invited to New Haven to teach courses and workshops to students, including Tom Strong, eager to experiment with typography, form and craft. When Yale’s design graduates scattered around Connecticut and the country as both practicing and teaching designers, the visual language and ideology of the ‘Swiss International Style’ spread far and wide.
The poster as a large, public, graphic form has held its prominent place throughout the history of design. Tom Strong’s vast collection of Swiss posters, accumulated over six decades, spans the mid-century to today. His archive includes diverse and boundary-breaking visual strategies employed through inventive uses of type and typography, image-making, layering and collage. The posters illustrate myriad expressions in style, subject matter and ever-evolving technologies. Strong’s posters showcase both the outsized influence of Swiss design as well as the contemporary experimentation that builds on that legacy. Seeing the posters fill the gallery walls is pure visual delight.
ColleCTomania invites the viewer to interact with the posters in a way that correlates to the way we interact with social content; The fast pace consumption of images and text and managing to remember the most impactful or relating subjects. The idea of swiping as we see content is no different from how we view art in any institution. We tend to stand for the works that render us speechless and with ColleCTomania, the wide number of posters that are being displayed serves as a compelling contrast to this belief.
“Why do I continue to collect Swiss posters? I guess you like Beethoven and then Stravinsky comes along with different principles, blows your head off. And then you go further, and you find more composers who you never knew anything about. The body and the brain and the ear are accustomed to surprise and difference and beauty. Other than that, I can’t defend it or describe it. These posters have power. You can’t deny it.”- Tom Strong