Apr 13

Apr 13 Golden State of Mind

Written by Cassandra C. Jones | Photos of Louise Sandhaus by Moira Tarmy

The difference between the East Coast and West Coast vibe has been apparent since they emerged as pillar-like bookends of the United States. The gravitational pull and intensity of both are so powerful that it is a trope to say you should never live on the East Coast long enough to get hard and never live on the West Coast long enough to get soft. It is equally common for people born on either Coast to swap places at some point in their lives or volley back and forth to create a balance. Either way, wherever you land can define you. Or, in exceptional cases, you can help define it.

One such catalyst, Louise Sandhaus, an Ojai local, graphic designer, published author, and design professor at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), journeyed from East to West and became a contributing and defining voice within the history of California graphic design.

“Notes of a Shopper by Julie,” 1967, NEWSPAPER COLUMN

Sandhaus was born in 1955 to two creative professionals in Norwood, Massachusetts. Her mother studied painting and illustration and worked for a local paper writing an illustrated column called "Notes of a Shopper by Julie." Her father was an art director. He oversaw the production of manuals for an aeronautics company and brochures for the tourist industry. He also had a short-lived company with a friend making screen-printed greeting cards.

BROCHURES DESIGNED BY NORMAN SANDHAUS FOR THE MEXICAN NATIONAL COUNSEL OF TOURISM, C. 1970’S

BROCHURES DESIGNED BY NORMAN SANDHAUS FOR THE MEXICAN NATIONAL COUNSEL OF TOURISM, C. 1970’S

That is how Sandhaus knew about graphic design. She grew up with parents who thought about aesthetics but used their creative skills to cater to consumer needs. They wanted to be "fine artists" but couldn't make it in that world and support a family at the same time. However, they both enjoyed painting and printing with woodblocks. Sandhaus grew up with a ping pong table in the basement that coupled as a printmaking area. Her parents also had a modern art studio filled with paper, paints, pens, pastels, and books. As a young girl, she was never allowed in that room. Nothing is more seductive or leaves a more profound imprint than something with "off-limits" stamped all over it. To her, it was like a candy store, and she would sneak in to partake of the art supplies as if they were forbidden fruits. Whatever happened in that sacred space was the initial sparks of a robust career in the realms of graphic design that would reach far beyond her parents' achievements.

In 1962, when she was seven, her parents moved to Orlando, Florida, and later divorced. That was pre-Disneyworld, and Sandhaus recounts, "living there was like being tortured." It was the anti-Semitic South, and she was an artsy teen who didn't fit into the acceptable norms of the time. She felt like an outsider and lonely in what she perceived as a cultural wasteland.

A 1960s postcard of a freeway, now I-4, going past a pre-Disney downtown Orlando flickr

While Sandhaus was still in high school, she interned at a local ad agency, her first experience working in design. And in 1974, she enrolled in a two-year program at The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, FL. She was interested in graphic design, but the school did not offer it. She studied advertising design instead. It wasn't a great program on the whole, but her teachers were working designers from New York who understood and taught the innovations happening in design at the time.

Even with limited schooling, she landed a job at an alternative lifestyle magazine in Boston, MA. Her parents’ influence and the ad agency internship from high school imbued her with an awareness of design and a specific skill set not typical of her young age at the time. She started as a staff designer, and by 23, she was promoted to Art Director, overseeing visual style, illustration, photography, type placement, and layout. She eventually left that job to experiment with other graphic design genres, freelance, and teach at the Art Institute of Boston.

POSTER DESIGNED BY LOUISE SANDHAUS AND FEMKE SNELTING, 1995

PHOTO OF MURIEL COOPER BY Marie Cosindas

In the mid-1980s, while living in Cambridge, she met designer Muriel Cooper, who was the first design director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, founded MIT's Visible Language Workshop, co-founded the MIT Media Lab, and was en route to becoming a legend in the genre of digital design. At the time, Cooper was beginning to formulate ideas about graphic design and computers. Sandhaus would see her around town, and they would talk about the future of the medium. These interactions became a kind of mentorship that led Sandhaus to think critically about design as a cultural practice and her future within that. It was Cooper's influence that inspired her to consider going to grad school.

Sandhaus decided to apply to the legendary Graphic Design program at Yale University. If you craved indoctrination into the aesthetic of Modern design, at the time, this was the school of choice. There was this idea that if she could hone that refinement in her work, accolades and acceptance would follow. She was accepted, but with "waitlist" status. While on standby for the final verdict, her life took an unexpected turn.

On an invite from an old upstairs neighbor and good friend, she decided to visit the West Coast for the first time in her life. She left Boston in February, just at the point when winter had become a drag. It was dark and cold, and the streets were slushy with old, dirty snow. When she arrived at LAX and stepped out to blue skies and sunshine, she thought, "this is fucking paradise." She stayed with her friend who lived in Santa Monica, near the ocean, and the warm breeze outside his window welcomed her.

Sandhaus had the excellent sense to track down and connect with some working California designers during that trip, including Lorraine Wild. She was a graphic designer, writer, art historian, and teacher at the CalArts in Valencia. Founded by Walt Disney, the school is famed for its innovative approach to visual and performing arts, design, film/video, and critical studies.

PHOTO OF LORRAINE WILD, 1991, FROM THE PEOPLE’S GRAPHIC DESIGN ARCHIVE

Wild extended an invitation to visit, and as the two women toured the campus, Sandhaus felt a resonance and familiarity about the school that she did not anticipate. Valencia had the warmth of Florida, and the school had a culture much like New York. Those two aspects, mixed with CalArts' avant-garde curriculum and the fact that its founding conception was to foster a "community of artists," was a recipe for perfection. As she glimpsed a life of creative freedom in this place, where being her true self would be cultivated and encouraged, the realization set in that Yale would kill her spirit and tame any good rebellion she possessed.

Sandhaus was already packing her bags in her mind, but she still had to apply. Unfortunately, CalArts required a full undergraduate degree, which Yale did not. As a result, she was short of the necessary credits. So, she returned to Boston and attended classes at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) for a few years before being accepted. In the end, Wild pulled some strings, and CalArts took her six credits shy of a full BFA. However, they allowed her to complete those while simultaneously pursuing her MFA, therefore, receiving the two degrees back-to-back in 1993 and 1994.

Her thesis centered around semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, how meaning gets infused into imagery, and how designers can control that meaning to communicate with precision. When people started to integrate computers into their work and lives en mass, Sandhaus was asking the question, "How can writing be transformed in a digital environment? How have the boundaries of text been expanded in the virtual realm? And when it comes to sharing and distributing something like an essay, how does one do that effectively if it is not in print form?

After continuing her education at the Jan van Eyck Academie in The Netherlands, in 1996, she returned to CalArts, this time as faculty.

Designing for digital environments was the new frontier, and building user experiences was uncharted territory. Rapid advances were happening in the mid-to-late-1990s, yet there were still many unknowns in the field, and disciplines were merging or expanding. Her curriculum embraced the forces of change and how computers were starting to impact design. Sandhaus was actively formulating discourse and methodologies that played out in her "Mutant Design" class at CalArts. The course merged with the Apple Design Project, for which Apple provided 11 schools internationally with mentorship to imagine responses to such themes as the Future of the Book or the Future of Libraries.

These types of investigations in academia helped to shape design just as much as the technology itself. Decades later, every creative discipline is defined and discussed in terms of media and technology, even the act of painting on canvas.

PHOTOPRINT BY AARON MARCUS, 1972, ONE OF THE FIRST TRAINED GRAPHIC DESIGNERS TO WORK WITH COMPUTER GRAPHICS. FROM THE PEOPLE’S GRAPHIC DESIGN ARCHIVE

C.O. L.A. 09, CATALOG DESIGNED BY LSD (LOUISE SANDHAUS DESIGN)

In 1998 Sandhaus became the co-director of the CalArts Graphic Design Program and founded her design studio, Louise Sandhaus Design (LSD).

She was the design program's sole director from 2004 to 2006, while simultaneously teaching and evolving her practice around museum exhibition design.

At a CalArts event at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), she met Stephanie Barron, the museum's senior curator. Sandhaus loved museums but was thinking about the pitfalls of exhibition design. In conversation with Barren, she expressed the possibility of a different approach, focusing on "user experience" instead of curatorial conventions. Her idea was to build a show where museum-goers are oriented both in the concept and physical experience. Meaning, how you guide visitors through space can directly impact how they understand the work. Barron called Sandhaus the next day and brought her on board for the upcoming exhibition, "Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity 1900-2000."

“THE WORLD FROM HERE,” 2002, FOR HAMMER MUSEUM. EXHIBITION DESIGN BY DURFEE REGN SANDHAUS

Sandhaus with partners, Iris Regn and Tim Durfee, spent several years listening to the visions of Barron's team and how they wanted the show to be understood, which proved a smart collaboration. The exhibition hosted over 800 bits of California art and history and filled five galleries at LACMA. "Made in California" opened in 2000, and had the experience not been carefully considered, it would have been exhausting. Twenty-one years later, that kind of exhibition design is standard in the approach to most museum curation.

That same year Sandhaus began conceiving and tinkering with a book project that would further lend her voice and perspective to the history of California. There was a period of fits and starts, but it evolved into ten years of research, interviews, collecting, curating, editing, and designing to realize the 430-page landmark study. Published in 2014 by Metropolis Books, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California and Graphic Design, 1936-1986, garnered critical acclaim, with a barrage of press including, not one, but two articles by the New York Times; an interview and book review. That is to note, even the "other" Coast perked up and took an interest.

EARTHQUAKES, MUDSLIDES, FIRES AND RIOTS, BOOK COVER DESIGN BY LSD (LOUISE SANDHAUS DESIGN) WITH HAYDEN SMITH. PHOTO BY MARC ALT

Sandhaus designed the hardcover with a bright pink and yellow gradient, orange spine, and iridescent metallic lettering. It has so much pop it stands out from across the room and beckons the way California itself calls to those who live elsewhere, with its epic sunsets, dazzling coastline, and celebrity quota. So it is no wonder you can still find Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots on display in museum book stores, art hotel lobbies, and the coffee tables of other well-known designers. It quickly became a "must own" and seminal text for anyone interested in how graphic design helped shape the edgy culture and eclectic vibe of the Golden State. It also highlights contributions made by women who were significant in West Coast design history but rarely got the accolades of their male counterparts.

Sandhaus expanded on one such woman in her next book, "A Colorful Life: Gere Kavanaugh, Designer." Co-written by Kat Catmur and published in 2019 by Princeton Architectural Press, it was the first tribute to Kavanaugh's life and work. The survey spans her impressive career designing vibrant and colorful spaces, home decor, car interiors, furniture, sculptures, graphics, toys, and textiles. In the first paragraph of the book, Sandhaus poetically states, "Kavanaugh is vibrant as a rainbow, with a spectrum of passions, creating visions just as bright." She then paints a vivid portrait of passion, persistence, popularity, and achievement that solidifies Kavanaugh's significant and extensive contributions to California graphic design starting in the 1960s and continuing to the present.

FINAL SPREAD OF A COLORFUL LIFE, DESIGNED BY LSD (LOUISE SANDHAUS DESIGN) AND KAT CATMUR FEATURING PHOTO OF GERE KAVANAUGH BY JENNIFER CHEUNG. BOOK PHOTO BY MARC ALT

With two successful books under her belt, Sandhaus has now set her sites on a very different approach to defining the history of Graphic Design. And she wants YOU, the person reading this article, to get involved.

When she was writing Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots, she had the idea for a graphic design archive that would be "by everyone, about everyone, and for everyone." During the research phase, she realized that the recorded history of Graphic Design offers a narrow view of what is actually out there. As well, there are far more graphic design examples in the world than historians could ever possibly preserve or acknowledge. So with a host of seasoned collaborators from the design world, "The People's Graphic Design Archive" was born. The project’s mission is to become a "crowd-sourced virtual archive" that will "challenge the status quo of graphic design archives."

MARIE NEURATH “ÒGBÌN DARADARA FUN ÌGBÁDUN DARADARA,” 1955, ENTRY EXAMPLE FROM THE PEOPLE’S GRAPHIC DESIGN ARCHIVE

The platform encourages the public to dig deep into their private collections and upload graphic design examples to the site, lending any known historical facts. Then it would be up to the community to fill in the blanks, if needed, adding to the stories and significance of each contribution. Thus, becoming a research tool that benefits practicing designers, design educators, and students. Moreover, as the archive grows and reaches a certain magnitude, it also has the power to inform our understanding of art, music, and the social sciences like anthropology, sociology, and politics which are all linked, in some way, to visual culture.

So, while Louise Sandhaus is far from Florida, where she started her design career, and we in California were lucky to get her, it turns out, everyone stands to benefit from the journey she has had.