Cranbrook Artists in Residence '78 Poster

Katherine McCoy created this group of posters for the educational community at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, just outside Detroit, Michigan. These designs illustrate McCoy’s groundbreaking practice of layering imagery and text, based on a theory she referred to as “typography as discourse,” in which the meaning of the work is determined through careful juxtapositions.
McCoy and her husband, Michael, served as cochairs of Cranbrook’s interdisciplinary and internationally recognized Design Department from 1971 to 1995. In their teaching and practice, they treated design as a communication device and a means by which intellectual, cultural, and social questions are framed and explored.