The Anderson and VCUarts are pleased to present The Medium is the Mess, a Graphic Design Juried Student Exhibition organized by Jamie Cox, Graphic Design ’27 and Lian Wasser-Goren, Graphic Design ’27. This open call invited designers to think outside their computers, and challenges them to get messy.
The exhibition will be on view from September 25 – October 17, with an opening reception on Friday, September 25, 5-7pm.
Participating Artists:
Hani Asad
Sarah Brooks
Eva Derryberry
Grace von Elten
Hazel Glick
Nathan Persson
Ava Soong
Jordan Tran
The Medium is the Mess is about pushing the boundaries of how a poster is conceptualized. The prompt encouraged artists and designers to create outside of the digital space, use their hands, and get messy. To think beyond a piece of paper in terms of the poster format, experiment with materiality, texture, and composition, while still maintaining typographic fundamentals using a chosen quote from the book, “The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of Effects.”
The publication The Medium is the Massage is an experimental manifesto created in collaboration by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, produced by Jerome Agel. It was published in 1967 and became widely acknowledged by creatives and influential within design history. The title comes from a phrase that McLuhan often used, “The medium is the message.” The publication aims to show the human connections to mainstream media and the ways in which it is used as an extension of human senses. Media has the essential abilities to both ground us in a physical sense, to serve as a tool to perceive and interpret the world around us.
