Miami Art Deco Postage | Gina Hamer

Gina Hamer © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Gina Hamer (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

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Peter De Vries—

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

I was thinking that we all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

 

Gina Hamer © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Bailey Higgins

Block of stamps © Bailey Higgins 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Bailey Higgins (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of several variations) from which the final block was made.

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Ralph C. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988, p. 230—

[American comic novelist] Peter De Vries is so funny a writer that it may seem inappropriate to take him seriously. His puns are unabashed. Like the cleaning lady, he says, we all come to dust. The mere thought of cremation turns one of his characters ashen. De Vries's aphorisms are no less outrageous. The American home, we are told, is an invasion of privacy. Never put off until tomorrow, we are advised, what you can put off indefinitely. What is an arsonist, we are asked, but someone who has failed to set the world on fire? De Vries's vignettes are even more discerningly surreal. A chiropractor attending a patient throws out his own back. A husband who demands that his wife explain why she bought a mink coat is told that she was cold. Another wife sues her husband's mistress for alienation of his affections, and asks for $65 in damages.

Art Deco Stamp © Bailey Higgins 2014

 

Pictorial Font Design | Bradley Kennedy

Image Font © Bradley Kennedy 2014

Above Design for a pictorial font by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Bradley Kennedy (2014).

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Sarah A. Leavitt, Introduction in Priscilla J. Henken, Taliesin Diary: A Year With Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012, p. 15—

The Taliesin Fellowship [Frank Lloyd Wright’s school near Spring Green WI] was received suspiciously by many; newspapers and magazines reported the activities at the farm to be exotic and somewhat strange…Beginning during World War II, the FBI focused on Wright’s antiwar stance and sympathies with Russia and Germany, and investigated whether Wright was unduly influencing his disciples to have anti-American views. Ten years later, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was still worried about Wright and the Fellowship, writing to the Bureau field office in Milwaukee that Wright needed to be watched, given that his “school contained no classrooms” and “appeared to be a religious cult.” Hoover mentioned rumors that “the foundation held dances to the moon, told the students how to think and that if a student did not attend certain meetings which had nothing to do with the study of architecture, the student would be dismissed from the school.” He also reported that his informant “had heard there were homosexuals attending the school.” Newspaper reports throughout the 1940s and 1950s made reference to Wright’s “communist” views and his nontraditional learning environment.

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).   

Miami Art Deco Postage | Kat Bartlett

Miami Art Deco Stamp © Kat Bartlett

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Kat Bartlett (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

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Alec Guinness, My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997), p. 46—

During one Christmas holiday in London I was taken to a fancy dress ball at the Town Hall in Kensington and I went as a candle and candlestick. I was sixteen. I fashioned a white tubular arrangement out of cardboard to go on my head, and from crepe paper a yellow and blue candle flame; also a wide white cardboard collar. I won the first prize, which was a large, brown, fiber suitcase. But it was a humiliating experience as so many people flicked their cigarettes into my collar and then said, "Sorry, thought you were an ashtray."

Miami Art Deco Stamp © Kat Bartlett

Pictorial Font Design | Desirée Dahl

Pictorial font (2014) © Desirée Dahl

Above Design for a pictorial font by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Desirée Dahl (2014).

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Alec Guinness, My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997), p. 156—

On waking this morning I thought how lovely it would be to have a tame bird again. There has been Percy, a South African grey parrot who lived with us for about twenty-five years, gave us a lot of laughs and painful nips, could recite about the first two lines of a Hamlet soliloquy—"O what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here"—except that he substituted "parrot" for "player," followed by gales of laughter; he also ripped sitting room curtains to shreds. 

Miami Art Deco Postage | Andrew Girod

Andrew Girod © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Andrew Girod (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

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Dard Hunter, American Arts and Crafts-era designer and papermaker, My Life with Paper: An Autobiography. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958—

A newspaper composing stick held about two inches of type—fifteen or sixteen lines. My father would always refer to the length of an editorial or any set matter as so many “sticks.” At noonday lunch I have often heard my mother ask about articles that were to appear in the paper that evening. For instance, my mother would say: “Did they have a large funeral for old Joe Basler?” and my father would answer: “One of the largest this year, about eight and a half sticks” (p. 10).

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[On a visit to Hammersmith, England, in 1912] I was only a few blocks from [Kelmscott Manor] where the famous modern edition of Chaucer had been printed, but the irregular streets had misled me. Upon inquiring the way to the old workshop of William Morris, I was surprised to be told by the young real estate agent that he did not know where William Morris had lived. He had never heard of Morris, and asked me if he had previously been the proprietor of a low rooming house for mendicants (p. 56).

Andrew Girod © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Shane Rumpza

Shane Rumpza © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Shane Rumpza (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of several variations) from which the final block was made.

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William L. Shirer, 20th Century Journey : A Memoir of a Life and the Times (Vol 1). Boston: Little Brown, 1976, p. 193—

We stage-struck youngsters (sometimes I would work as an extra stagehand, moving scenery and props between acts [at Green's Opera House in Cedar Rapids IA], when a great star I wanted to see at close hand came to town) grew up in Cedar Rapids on a strange legend about Sarah Bernhardt. It was that she had been born Sarah King in the village of Rochester [IA], twenty-five miles down the Cedar River from us, that her mother had died when she was five, that she had run away soon afterward, entered a French convent at St Paul [MN], and, having learned the new language, set off to Paris, where she began her fabulous career in the theater. The legend grew when in 1905 it was reported that a veiled but elegantly dressed woman had stopped off briefly at Rochester to lay a bouquet of roses on the grave of the elder Mrs. King. When reporters noted that Sarah Bernhardt had played an engagement at nearby Iowa City the previous evening, they put two and two together, as reporters sometimes are tempted to do, and concluded that it was the great Parisian actress who had made the mysterious visit to the grave of one who must have been her mother. Ergo! The great Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous French actress of our time, was an Iowa girl!

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William L. Shirer, ibid, p. 18—

[The American novelist] Sinclair Lewis had worked as a telegraph editor and editorial writer on the [Waterloo IA] Daily Courier in 1908, the year after he graduated from Yale. He was fired after ten weeks, the editor informing him, Lewis told me once, "Young man, you'll never make it as a newspaperman. You can't write."

Shane Rumpza © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Cassandra Beadle

Cassandra Beadle © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Cassandra Beadle (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp from which the final block was made.

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William James, The Principles of Psychology—

In the meaningless French words “pas de lieu Rhone que nous,” who can recognize immediately the English “paddle your own canoe”?

 H.G. Wells, as quoted by Simon Nowell-Smith, compiler, The Legend of the Master (London, Constable, 1947), p. 149—

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I once saw [Henry] James quarreling with his brother William James, the psychologist. He had lost his calm; he was terribly unnerved, He appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on what was and what was not permissible behavior in England…I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James and his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry’s passionate regard for the polish upon the surfaces of life and he was immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye inn, which had its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House [Henry’s residence], G.K. Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our vast contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. So with a scandalous directness he had put the gardener’s ladder against that ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over! Henry had caught him at it.

Cassandra Beadle © 2014

Miami Art Deco Postage | Kaisee Wiesmueller

Kaisee Wiesmueller © 2014

Above Block of synergistic postage stamps by University of Northern Iowa graphic design student Kaisee Wiesmueller (2014), commemorating historic Art Deco architecture in Miami. Scroll down to see the single stamp (one of several variations) from which the final block was made.

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Audrey Flack, Art & Soul: Notes on Creating (New York: Penguin Arkana Books, 1991), p. 118—

When I was a student at Yale, [American painter] Stuart Davis came as a visiting artist. He walked into my studio and looked for a long time at my paintings and then began to speak. As he spoke, his cigarette never left his lips. It wobbled up and down at the corner of his mouth. I watched as the ash got longer and longer and finally flopped onto his shirt. As the cigarette burned down and got shorter and shorter, I realized that I hadn't heard a word he'd said. I was afraid that the cigarette would burn his lips, which had already turned brown from years of tobacco—life process interfering with art.

Kaisee Wiesmueller © 2014

Frank Lloyd Wright Poster Exhibit

Wright Posters at UNI Rod Library

Cedar Rock, originally known as the Lowell Walter Residence, was designed in 1950 by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. An exemplar of his Usonian style, it is located near Quasqueton IA, and has been designated as Cedar Rock State Park. For the past ten years, the Friends of Cedar Rock organization has held an annual seminar—called An Afternoon with Frank Lloyd Wright—in which speakers talk about Wright's life, beliefs and achievements.

To celebrate the tradition of that seminar, graphic design students in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa, were asked to design a series of posters that focus on Wright and his accomplishments, not limited to Cedar Rock. Twenty of those posters are on exhibit (through December 12, 2014) on the ground floor (in the Book Bistro area) at the Rod Library on the UNI campus in Cedar Falls IA.

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).