Open Art Space is a series of programs and workshops organized by the MoMA Museum of Modern Art for LGBTQ+ high school students who are interested in thinking about and making art in a creative and welcoming environment.

For this series of flyers, posters and animations I created a bold and colorful graphic language with the MoMA Sans typeface as a base. All flyers were created on the copy machine, by cutting, pasting and overlaying different typographic elements and pictures from previous Open Art Space events.

Animated title wall and exhibition graphics designed by Eline Mul and Olya Domoradova for an exhibition at MoMA Museum of Modern Art about American comedian/actor/filmmaker Jerry Lewis.

Few stars from the golden age of Hollywood valued looking – and being looked at – more than Jerry Lewis (1926–2017) did. Having amassed years of stage experience before he emerged as a major film actor and director, he made acknowledging his audience an essential aspect of the “comedy of looks” that characterized his work. And in no other Lewis film is the experience of being seen so central as in The Nutty Professor (1963), in which he treats his audience as a main character.

With this premise in mind, we created an animation that contrasts slowed down footage from The Nutty Professor, where people stare at the main character’s transformed persona, with a blunt slapstick-like type treatment of MoMA Sans.

The stretched typography and big flashing arrow pointing down the stairs to the exhibition emphasize the comedic aspect of Jerry Lewis’ work. While stretching and squeezing, the exhibit title comes onto the screen and repeatedly pushes out the film footage.

The exhibition entrance of Joan Miró – Birth of the World is covered in a dark blue celestial paint wash reminiscent of an inky cosmos – foregrounding the idea of the creation of the earth and the vast universe surrounding it.

In Miró’s signature work, The Birth of the World, he covered the ground of the oversize canvas by applying paint in an variety of ways that recall poetic chance procedures. On top of this he added a series of pictographic signs and symbols that seem more drawn than painted, transforming the broken syntax, constellated space, and dreamlike imagery of avant-garde poetry into a radiantly imaginative and highly inventive form of painting.

Visitors walk through the transformative threshold before entering into the brightly lit galleries, where they encounter some 60 paintings, works on paper, prints, illustrated books, and objects – made primarily between 1920, the year of Miró’s first, catalytic trip to Paris, and the early 1950s, when his unique visual language became internationally renowned.

The exhibition title, designed by Eline Mul and Damien Saatdjian, is set in De Vinne (Bitstream), and hand painted in a light cloudy grey on top of the dark blue walls. The directional typography leads you through the dark entryway, while the generous size of the letters highlights the playful personality of the type characters.

In 2018 we were invited by Rob Giampietro at MoMA to design a temporary identity for MoMA while the museum underwent a major expansion that would make the iconic institution thirty percent larger. The result of that project was a colorful interpretation of MoMA’s façade, which is itself a amalgamation of eight buildings built by multiple architects over ninety years. Our design abstracted the buildings to create a unified symbol for the museum as it went through the transformation.

The following year we were asked by MoMA to develop an advertising campaign that would announce the reopening of the finished museum in the fall of 2019. From the beginning we were interested in the campaign being based solely on typography and color. We wanted it to rely heavily on the recently designed MoMA Sans by Commercial Type. After months of explorations into different approaches to language and tone-of-voice that might represent MoMA, the chosen approach was to use the voices and thoughts of artists, (both famous and emerging) to speak about ideas related to transformation and the future. The campaign appeared in the fall of 2019 across the city on public transportation, billboards, screens and in print publications.

Art Lab: Line, Shape, Color is a hands-on space creative space at the Museum of Modern Art. Kids can come here to do crafts that highlight works in the museum’s collection through drawing, working with wire, designing emojis, and playing with a light box.

The typeface used throughout MoMA’s Art Lab is MoMA Sans

Private Lives Public Spaces, intimately highlights home movies and amateur films from MoMA’s collection. The words “Private Lives” vibrate in blue, like TV static, while “Public Spaces” is set in a semi-transparent frosted vinyl. By placing the two lines on opposite sides of the window, there is a subtle sense of dimensionality between them, highlighting the dichotomy between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces.

The exhibition was produced by the MoMA Design Studio, using ABC Ginto Nord and MoMA Sans for all typography.

Curatorial Team: Ron Magliozzi, Brittany Shaw, Katie Trainor, Peter Williamson, and Ashley Swinnerton

Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection brings together works by more than a dozen artists, made in the past decade and recently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art. The artists that make up this intergenerational selection address current anxiety and unrest around the world and offer critical reflections on our present moment.

The design language for the exhibition takes its form from artistic and political manifestos—large, bold, and declaratory.

For more information, visit damiensaatdjian.com and devapardue.com.

Club 57 was a countercultural hub located in the basement of a Polish church at 57 St. Marks Place in Manhattan’s East Village where artists, musicians, performers, and curators met to exchange ideas, party, and show new work. The exhibition at MoMA presents their accomplishments across a range of disciplines—from film, video, performance, and theater to photography, painting, drawing, printmaking, collage, zines, fashion design, and curating.

Inspired by the the club’s cheaply made xerox flyers, Damien Saatdjian and Eva Bochem-Shur designed an identity system with large, graphic typography, and a neon title wall. The advertising, posters, and flyers used photographs from parties and performances, along with works of art created by attendees.

For more information, visit damiensaatdjian.com and evabochem-shur.com.