Turner Kopecky | Futura Typeface Poster

Futura Typeface Poster © Turner Kopecky (2015)

Above Poster by Turner Kopecky, graphic design student, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa (2015), in commemoration of Paul Renner and his design of the typeface Futura.

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Morris Horowitz [pseudonym], a peddler and Russian-Jewish immigrant, recalling what he witnessed in Chicago in 1871 on the night of the Great Chicago Fire, as quoted in Ann Banks, ed., First-Person America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, pp. 32-33—

No one slept that night. People gathered on the streets and all kinds of reasons were given for the fire. I stood near a minister talking to a group of men. He said the fire was sent by God as a warning that the people were wicked. He said there were too many saloons in Chicago, too many houses of prostitution. A woman who heard this said that a fire started in a barn was a direct warning from God since Jesus was also born in a barn. I talked to a man who lived next door to Mrs. O'Leary, and he told me that the fire started in Mrs. O'Leary's barn. She went out to milk the cow while it was beginning to get dark. The cow kicked the lamp over and that's how the fire started. There were all kinds of songs made up about the fire. Years after, people were still singing songs about it…

Posters | Gina Hamer & Bailey Higgins

Poster © Gina Hamer (2015)

Each spring, in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa, members of the Art History Faculty (Charles Adelman and Elizabeth Sutton) sponsor a competition in which students prepare and submit original research papers. The best ones, as determined by preliminary screening and by an invited juror (this year Jennie Klein from Ohio University) are then presented in public by their student authors. This takes place at the Annual Art History Symposium (scheduled for Friday, April 10, 2015), during which six hundred dollars is awarded in prize money. For the past two years, the department's graphic design students have helped to support this tradition by designing promotional posters (also a juried competition). Shown here (above and below) are this year's top two Call for Papers posters, as chosen by the art historians. The student designers are Gina Hamer (above) and Bailey Higgins (below).

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Richard Critchfield, Those Days: An American Album (New York: Laurel 1987), p. 252. An excerpt from a letter to Anne (Williams) Critchfield (the author's mother) from [first name] Hadwen, Jr., who was then teaching at the American Academy in Guatemala (c1927)—

…Last Sunday we took in a bullfight. Indians danced in the plaza, wearing fancy dress and masks. We had a great time. Bull got out of the ring & hundreds of us ran toward the church where it turned around & went the other way. Threw several men into the air as it went & I think one was killed. But I doubt if it was as dangerous as driving on Iowa's Lincoln Highway on a Sunday afternoon…

We live just 12 miles north of the Lincoln Highway.

Poster © Bailey Higgins (2015)