exhibition identity for christina ramberg: a retrospective at the hammer museum. resisting tidy classification, ramberg’s work broadly feels very american to me, unique to her time, place, and community of close peers in chicago. my conceptual starting point was inspired by the artist’s archive of found material and snapshots taken of hand lettering and diy signage on the city streets around her. it also considers other forms of her visual research—magazines such as kitsch and aggressive gals, frederick’s of hollywood sales catalogs, and comics like nancy, as well as the positioning of her work somewhere between pop and imagist.¹ i chose to begin my research with american wood type. aside from its widespread prevalence across the states, beginning in the 19th century and continuing to the present day, its hand-carved qualities and use in vernacular signage and diy print material fit easily with the sorts of soulful “street surfaces,” as ramberg called them, that the artist was documenting and collecting.

catalpa is a custom typeface i created for this exhibition, and is named after one of the streets in chicago that ramberg traversed and photographed. the face is a modified revival of julius klinkhardt’s 1885 schmale runde grotesk, a rounded gothic that was also offered ten years later in a heavier weight as wood type.² i’ve included a set of alternates that incorporate stylized aspects of decorative american wood type, deconstructed and abstracted and created specifically for the exhibition title.³

the exhibition is organized by the art institute of chicago, and is curated by thea liberty nichols, associate research curator, and mark pascale, janet and craig duchossois curator. the presentation at the hammer is organized by paulina pobocha, robert soros senior curator, with ashton cooper, curatorial assistant.

designed materials include largescale building banner, digital bus shelter advertisement, digital screens on the building exterior and lobby interior, spread in seasonal print calendar, gallery exterior, exhibition introductory wall and didactic texts, and poster and postcards available in the museum store.