29 Photographers - Postcards from Milwaukee

29 Photographers - Postcards from Milwaukee exhibition catalog

While I was completing my MFA at UW-Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Art Museum was preparing to host the exhibition Postcards from America: Milwaukee, featuring the work of eleven Magnum photographers. To help support the work of those photographers while they visited the city to create work for the show, a joint class between UW-Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design was created with one faculty member from each school’s photography area, a whole bunch of undergraduate students, and me (the only graduate student). For the course to still functionally be a photography course, the students were tasked with creating their own work focused on Milwaukee - in whatever manner they saw fit (in addition to assisting the visiting photographers).

The student version culminated in a one night only show of the work, which was accompanied by an exhibition catalog for posterity. I was selected to do the design for the catalog based on my background as a designer and experience with book design. Owing to the number of included photographers in the book, everyone is listed by name on the back cover, while the front cover features a section of an image of Milwaukee by one of the students (Elizabeth Rath, from her Translations photos that have been pixelated beyond recognition). Each included photographer received two pages in a spread, the left indicating the artist, the title of their series, and artist statement, then one small image, and the title information for that photograph and whichever photographs they included (multiple small images or one large image) on the right page.