April Greiman


April Greiman is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s." According to design historian Steven Heller, “April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital.” “She is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design.” Her art combines her Swiss design training with West Coast postmodernism.
Greiman finds the title graphic designer too limiting and prefers to call herself a "transmedia artist". Her work has inspired designers to develop the computer as a tool of design and to be curious and searching in their design approach. Her style includes typelayering, where groups of letterforms are sandwiched and layered, but also made to float in space along with other 'objects in space' such as shapes, photos, illustrations and color swatches. She creates a sense of depth and dynamic, in particular by combining graphic elements through making extensive use of Apple Macintosh technology. Los Angeles Times called her graphic style "an experiment in creating 'hybrid imagery'".

Background

Born on March 22, 1948, April Greiman grew up in New York City. Her father was an early computer programmer, systems analyst, and founder and president of The Ventura Institute of Technology. Her only sibling, Paul, became a meteorologist and specialist in climatic and atmospheric interplanetary modeling.
After completing her studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, Greiman worked as a freelance designer and worked directly with the curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Greiman moved to Los Angeles in 1976 where she established the multi-disciplinary approach where she "...blends technology, science, word and image with color and space...". She directed her first design studio April Greiman, Inc. from 1978–2004 and began her current Los Angeles-based design consultancy ' in 2005. During the 1970s, she rejected the belief among many contemporary designers that computers and digitalization would compromise the International Typographic Style; instead, she exploited pixelation and other digitization "errors" as integral parts of digital art, a position she has held throughout her career.
In 1982, Greiman became head of the design department at the California Institute of the Arts, also known as Cal Arts. Upon her relocation from New York City to Los Angeles, she met photographer-artist Jayme Odgers, who became a significant influence on Greiman. Together, they designed a famous Cal Arts poster in 1977 that became an icon of the California New Wave. In 1984, she lobbied successfully to change the department name to Visual Communications, as she felt the term “graphic design” would prove too limiting to future designers. In that year, she also became a student herself and investigated in greater depth the effects of technology on her own work.
She then returned to full-time practice and acquired her first Macintosh computer. She would later take the Grand Prize in MacWorlds First Macintosh Masters in Art Competition. April also contributed to the design of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, by creating a memorable poster of running legs silhouetted against a square of bright blue sky in collaboration with Jayme Odgers. An early adopter of this computer as noted in Apple's Mac @ 30 video , Greiman produced an issue of Design Quarterly in 1986, notable in its development of graphic design. Entitled Does it make sense?, the edition was edited by Mildred Friedman and published by the MIT Press / Walker Art Center. "She re-imagined the magazine as a fold-out artwork to almost three-by-six feet. The poster must be carefully unfolded three times across, nine times down. It contained a life-size, MacVision-generated image of her outstretched naked body adorned with symbolic images and text— a provocative gesture, which emphatically countered the objective, rational and masculine tendencies of modernist design." Greiman has said about the poster's unusual format and title “Hopefully, someone will make some sense out of this… The sense it has for me is that it’s new and yet old,… it’s a magazine, which is a poster, which is an object, which is… crazy.” The poster was also launched as a complement to the Walker Art Center's new Everyday Art Gallery.
Miracle Manor , a desert spa retreat owned with her husband, architect Michael Rotondi, from 1997–2018 is a showcase for her more recent three-dimensional design of space in natural landscapes.
Greiman has won many awards, including lifetime achievement awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal in 1998 and the in 2018, as well as the Chrysler Award for Innovation in 1998. She has also published several books, such as April Greiman: Floating Ideas into Space and Something from Nothing. Greiman currently teaches at the University of Southern California as a Professor of Design in the , and previously taught at Woodbury University's School of Architecture and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. With four honorary doctorates, April Greiman is seen as one of the "ultimate risktakers" for her unorthodox and progressive approach to design by embracing new technologies. In 1995, the US Postal Service launched a stamp designed by Greiman to commemorate the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In 2006, the Pasadena Museum of California Art mounted a one-woman show of her digital photography entitled: Drive-by Shooting: April Greiman Digital Photography. She was also in the major group show at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris called Elle@Centre Pompidou. In 2007, Greiman completed her largest ever work: a public mural, Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice, spanning "seven stories of two building facades marking the entrance to the Wilshire Vermont Metro Station in Los Angeles." In 2014, Greiman collaborated with the London based artist-run organization Auto Italia South East along with a group of artists including Metahaven, in an exhibition POLYMYTH x Miss Information''. The exhibition program was included in the external listings for Frieze Art Fair.

Notable works and accomplishments

Greiman first studied graphic design as an undergraduate at the Kansas City Art Institute, from 1966–1970. She then went on to study at the Allgemeine Künstgewerberschule Basel, now known as the Basel School of Design in Basel, Switzerland. She was also a student of Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart, and she was influenced by the International Style and by Weingarts' introduction to the style later known as New Wave, an aesthetic that moved away from a Modernist heritage.
Greiman has received four honorary doctorates from Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, California ; , California ; , Cambridge, Massachusetts ; and Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri.
Greiman's list of influences is well-rounded: Among them are her former teacher Wolfgang Weingart and Armin Hofmann, songwriter Leonard Cohen, theoretical physicist David Bohm, psychiatrist Carl Jung, architect Ludwig Wittgenstein and spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Teaching experience

Since 2019, Greiman has been a Professor of Design at the , University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. She was Adjunct Faculty at the School of Architecture, Woodbury University, Burbank, California from 2010–2018 and Adjunct Faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles, California from 1992–2009. Greiman worked with the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California as Adjunct Faculty in the Graphic Design Program, School of Art in 1978 and was the Director of the Visual Communications Program from 1982–1984. Additionally she was an Assistant Professor in the , University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from 1971–1976.

Keynote speeches