Friday, February 26, 2016

Designing a Museum Poster


When I was in El Paso in December I saw Marc Chagall's The Green Violinist at the El Paso Museum  of Art.







































I've always loved this painting and saw it frequently at the Guggenheim during my trips to New York in the 1990's. When I took the Page Layout class in 2010 one of the first assignments was to design a museum poster. The Green Violinist is a very narrow painting that presents challenges to feature it in a  traditional sized poster with print advertising.

The poster I designed was for an exhibit about Jewish life in the shtetls or small villages of Eastern Europe. Since the primary focus of the exhibit was not Chagall's art, I didn't use the entire painting. The background without the angel emphasizes the style of the rural buildings . The orange and red colors of the violin are now more prominent and match the color behind the text. The violin player however is not seen on the roof. But again, the Fiddler on the Roof was not the focus of this exhibit.

The project was a class assignment at Saint Louis Community College. The poster was never commercially used.

The images of the poster at the bus stops were made in a digital photo editing program.

The use of this artwork is covered by fair use guidelines because the art image is readily available on the internet and is a low resolution copy that is unsuitable for commercial use.