Typography Exhibit At Design Museum Explores City’s History Through Graphic Design

THE LOOP — Chicagoans can explore the city and its history through letters we see every day — like colorful painted grocery store signs, local magazines and intricate graffiti — in a new exhibit at the Design Museum of Chicago.

The exhibit, “Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types,” opened this month and runs through April 4 at the Design Museum of Chicago, 72 E. Randolph St. It’s a part of the Terra Foundation for American Art‘s Art Design Chicago Initiative.

Using visual, digital and audio components, the exhibit spotlights Chicago’s history and culture of typography — or the intentional creation, design and formation of letters — said curator Amira Hegazy, who worked on the exhibit for over three years.

While Chicago was a national center of printing beginning in the early 1900s, especially flourishing post-World War II, “Letters Beyond Form” focuses on how that history runs parallel to and intertwines with what people see around them in their neighborhoods.

“We like to think of design as something that lives with us,” Hegazy said. “What you study isn’t always what your neighborhood looks like. … We see remnants of that in everything.”

One example of this is in the work of Sir Charles, the pseudonym for a Brighton Park native and former gang member turned artist and designer.

His exhibition piece, “Vida,” reads “Tomorrow is Never Promised” in gold lettering, representing life, against a white background, representing purity. It’s dedicated to his girlfriend’s aunt, who recently passed away after living her last days with terminal cancer, and all friends and family lost to gang violence and tragic events.

After a gang-related school shooting happened at Sir Charles’ daughter’s school in 2015, he began using the Old English hand often associated with gangs to write unifying messages — flipping the script on what people have come to expect from the style, Hegazy said.

Combining calligraphy and graffiti handstyles, Sir Charles has made it his mission to promote messages of empowerment and forgiveness through his writing, Hegazy said.

“It initially was definitely putting him at risk,” Hegazy said. “And then by going to the gangs and telling them where he came from, what he was about, he’s actually been able to speak to these gang members and these young people, especially in in their own language.”

For Hegazy, Sir Charles’ work is a callback to the origin of gangs in the city, which weren’t initially violent.

“Chicago’s history of gangs and gang violence is often something that’s pushed away. A lot of them started out as athletic clubs and party clubs and just young people trying to make community in neighborhoods that the city of Chicago had not supported or forgotten about,” she said.

Sir Charles has gone on to create his own brand, Made in Chi-Town With Love, which shines a light on South Side neighborhoods and communities dealing with gang violence. He’s also published a book of his work, “Letters to Chicago by Sir Charles.”

Another artist featured in the exhibit is Oswald Cooper, one of the most foremost typographers of his time who has had a lasting impact on Chicago design. Cooper is best known as the creator of the Cooper Black typeface, which became one of the most popular American typefaces in the 1920s and ’30s.

Like street writing, Chicagoans have probably seen Cooper’s work around the city.

“Once you recognize it, you see it everywhere,” Hegazy said. “My favorite is auto shops. Every neighborhood has an auto shop that uses Cooper Black.”

Grocery store signs — hand-painted in bold lettering, traditionally with primary colors and more recently with fluorescents — also originated in Chicago in the early 1900s and were made popular by the Beverly Sign Company, Hegazy said.

That familiar style of sign painting is known as “Chicago Style,” where each piece of information is designated to a specific part of the sign, she said.

“‘Paneled’ is what they call it, because it’s always consistent,” Hegazy said. “You always know where to find the information. You don’t have to search for the price, it’s always the biggest. The name of the product is always smaller and on top.”

The style of sign quickly spread across the Midwest because of its “effectiveness and vibrancy,” according to the exhibit.

The thread that ties the exhibit together is love, Hegazy said: love for the city, love for design and “love as a motivator to create for our communities.”

“Chicago was the inspiration,” said Tanner Woodford, founder and executive director of the Design Museum of Chicago. “As we were walking around the city thinking about the stories that haven’t been told, we realized that there was this very large, pervasive graphic design story through typography. And we also noticed that it was a way of almost branding different neighborhoods and communities and then seeing how those communities interact with each other, and how feelings and styles started to sort of blend across the city. So that was the seed.”

Typography allows people to speak beyond linguistic barriers, Hegazy and Woodford said — like Chicago artist Tubs has done with a bold, blue-and-red, Chicago-themed piece with Spanish writing. He painted it live in front of a crowd during the exhibition’s opening night.

“Even without being able to read [Spanish], we still get this vibrancy, this understanding that there’s love in this, there’s love for Chicago, there’s this energetic feeling,” Hegazy said. “Whether or not we can read it, it’s still there.”

With funding and support from the Terra Foundation for American Art, Hegazy and Woodford are excited they can “give people their flowers while they’re alive” by shining a light on both historical and contemporary work, they said.

It’s “opening a lot of avenues in Chicago for more exhibitions that are both explorative,” Hegazy said.

“We’re not telling our stories,” Woodford said. “We’re telling Chicago’s stories, and we have to be very careful when we do that. We believe that design is all around you all the time, and that it’s our job to sort of just hold a mirror and recognize that, as opposed to coming in and trying to put our stamp on it or direct it in some specific way. I say this all the time to folks when they walk in, and I mean it, this place is as much yours as it is mine.”

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