For the past twenty years, renowned graphic designer and fine artist Paula Scher has been reinterpreting society’s approach to data and our visual representation of the trafficked environment. Through her large-scale cartographic paintings, she has created a novel way of mapping traditional infor... Read more
For the past twenty years, renowned graphic designer and fine artist Paula Scher has been reinterpreting society’s approach to data and our visual representation of the trafficked environment. Through her large-scale cartographic paintings, she has created a novel way of mapping traditional information, while subjectively twisting and confounding it. Intricate, colorful and obsessively detailed, her paintings have the foundations of accuracy, but are ultimately impressionistic visions of our interconnected world.
Scher culls data from informational media such as headlines, commercial maps, and diagrams and renders them in madcap fields of hand-drawn typography. The accumulated textures and patterns provide an exuberant portrait of contemporary information in all its complexity and subjectivity, while questioning our innate ability to synthesize and analyze.
Scher has been a principal of the international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991, where she is renowned for her creation of graphic identities, publications and environments. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich; the Denver Art Museum; and the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Scher is a past recipient of the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and in 2001 she received the profession’s highest honor, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Medal, in recognition of her distinguished achievements and contributions to the field. She is a laureate of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and in 2006 she was awarded the Type Directors Club Medal. She has been a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale since 1993 and was elected its president in 2009. In 2006 she was named to the Art Commission of the City of New York.
