Tessa Mars: Île Modèle, Manman Zile, Island Template exhibition catalog
Tessa Mars is a Haitian contemporary visual artist, born in 1985 in Port-au-Prince. Her work focuses on Caribbean identity, how this region’s history was shaped by violence, and questions the status of women and their bodies in this legacy. Île Modèle, Manman Zile, Island Template is the catalog of her exhibition presented at Le Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince from May 31 to June 29, 2019.
Paris-based studio Maison Solide took care of the book design and chose to work with Kessler from Production Type. This family by Alaric Garnier is available in three optical sizes. While titles on the cover and for the chapters use capitals from the sharp Super Display style, the body copy is set in the sturdier Kessler Text. There, the designers harnessed much of the potential of the family: from the Italic – which is a modified sloped roman, with cursive elements for unseriffed glyphs – to oldstyle figures and small caps. Kessler is supported by the sans-serif Surt by Blaze Type which is used to set captions and marginal notes.
The catalog includes texts by Barbara Prézeau-Stephenson, Veerle Poupeye, and David Frohnapfel, as well as dialogues with Christopher Cozier and Carlo A. Célius. It was published in a bilingual softcover edition (in French and English) by Le Centre d’Art d’Haiti in collaboration with Naima.
