Our first meeting with Steven and Kat, who run the foundation, took place in their warehouse. That's typical of this kind of work, and one of the best parts of working with art foundations: you get to stand in front of a ton of work the public never sees. Their collection is deep, and they walked us through quite a bit of it, first one artist's history, then the other's, pulling out oil paintings, works on paper, sketches. They had a story for every piece they pulled.
During that visit they also made the problem clear. The foundation stewards the legacies of mother-daughter abstract painters Alice Trumbull Mason and Emily Mason, and distilling one artist's legacy into a brand identity is hard enough; this project doubled it. Alice (1904–1971) was abstraction's early believer in America. She painted her first non-objective work in 1929, stood as the lone abstract participant at the 1935 Washington Square Art Show, and helped found American Abstract Artists in 1936. Ad Reinhardt once said of her that without Alice Trumbull Mason, the abstract painters of his generation "would not be here nor in such strength." Emily (1932–2019) had her first art education in her mother's studio, then spent her career building her own language of color, luminous veils of paint that belonged to no school but hers. All the while, she tended her mother's posthumous reputation, and in 2018 she made that work permanent, establishing a foundation to champion Alice's legacy and fund opportunities for underrepresented artists. When Emily died the following year, the foundation broadened its mission to include her own work, and in 2020 took both artists' names.
The mission was unified. The identity was not. Emily had a website, Alice had a website, and the foundation had a third, so a visitor could spend an afternoon with one artist and never learn the other existed. The full name didn't help. At eight words, "The Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation" was accurate but unusable in conversation, on a business card, or in a URL. What we saw in the warehouse, two deep bodies of work held with equal devotion, needed a single identity that could hold both artists the same way.
Finding one name for two artists
The name was the first design decision. Institutional art brands have long understood the value of compression (MoMA, LACMA), so before drawing anything, we condensed. EMATM takes the initials of both artists in equal measure. Five letters. Easy to say, and finally short enough for a clean URL at ematm.org. It took some lobbying, but the foundation saw the value and embraced it.
The monogram follows the same logic. Both artists share the M of Mason, so we built the mark from two Ms, mirrored and interlocked. Read one way it's a shared initial. Read another, it's a daughter's practice reflecting and answering her mother's, the same way the foundation Emily built for Alice now holds them both.
Around the mark, the identity stays quiet on purpose. A limited color palette. One typeface family. Plenty of space. Our goal with art foundations is always the same: a timeless brand that's memorable without distracting from what should be the main focus, the artists' work.
A digital archive
Once the identity was settled, the website applied its logic. Three sites became one, and the homepage now splits evenly between the two artists, each with her own portrait, dates, and entry point into her work. Biographies and chronologies were designed with an editorial lens, closer to a magazine profile than a database.
The audience for this work spans academics, researchers, art enthusiasts, and emerging artists, so we treated image quality as a technical goal in its own right. Artwork is served at very high resolution in next-generation formats, with zoom deep enough to catch light pencil lines and individual brushstrokes. It's the closest a browser gets to that feeling in the warehouse, leaning in close to a painting.
The brand at work
The identity now carries the foundation's advocacy beyond its own walls. Working with EMATM, we designed an exhibition prospectus that makes the case for a large-scale museum show of Alice's work, tracing her path from the first non-objective paintings of 1929 to the Shutter Paintings that anticipated Minimalism. Her work sits in the collections of MoMA, the Met, the Whitney, and the British Museum, but she has never had a large-scale museum exhibition of her own. The prospectus exists to change that, and the brand system, quiet, structured, built to put the art first, is doing exactly what it was designed for.
The results
A daughter spent her career championing her mother. The foundation she built now champions them both, and its identity finally says so: one name, one home, equal standing.
Condensed was incredible at receiving changes and finding answers... They delivered most everything to meet our ideal deadlines. As with all projects, there are new challenges as you delve into the project and the scope and scale of the project sometimes evolves. The team was incredibly receptive to our feedback and flexible to these needs.
— Steven Rose, Executive Director, EMATM
