Lenore G. Tawney Foundation :: Brand Strategy, Visual Identity, Web Design

Twelve years (and counting) with the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

In 2013, Kathleen Nugent Mangan, executive director of the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, came to us with a challenge. Lenore Tawney had been an important influence on generations of artists, but her name was still largely unfamiliar outside the fiber art community. The Foundation needed a way to introduce her work to a broader audience.

There was a complication. Tawney's work doesn't fit easily into the usual visual language of the art world. She began as a weaver, but over the course of her career pushed the medium into sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, and bookmaking. Her work could be delicate or monumental, often using space as an essential part of the composition.

The identity needed to give the Foundation a recognizable presence without creating another visual layer between people and the work.

Judged by our cover

We prepared a full round of logo concepts for Kathleen and presented them with conviction. The cover page of that presentation carried a headline set in an ultra-light weight of Helvetica Neue. Kathleen liked the typography we chose for the cover page better than any of the other logotype options we presented.

We could have dug in and defended the concepts. But we knew her instinct was correct. Tawney's identity should be a line of type so light it reads like a single strand of thread across the page. Modern and approachable, like Lenore herself. Tawney once designed an "open reed" for her loom so that a piece could change shape while she wove it, and we've thought about that a lot since. So our plan changed shape mid-weave. Fine.

Helvetica Neue itself couldn't stay, though. In 2013 it was everywhere, so we went hunting for light typefaces with more character and landed on Centra No.1 by Josh Finklea. Centra starts from the Bauhaus geometric sans and then relaxes the dogma, warming the geometry with a humanist character that owes something to Gill Sans. Sound familiar? Bauhaus training, architectural structure, nothing cold about it. Set in Centra No.1 Thin, her name holds a precise line with the lightest possible touch, which is a fair description of the weavings too.

Fiber art finds it's thread

Six years later Kathleen wrote to us again. Interest in Lenore had been building. Tate Modern. The Bauhaus centennial in Berlin. The Whitney's permanent collection, new representation by Alison Jacques Gallery in London, and a major retrospective and monograph, Mirror of the Universe, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Suddenly everyone wanted to exhibit Lenore Tawney.

Kohler went further than an exhibition. The Arts Center acquired Tawney's final studio, 486 pieces in all, from weavings and assemblages down to the furniture, and installed the whole environment at its Art Preserve in Sheboygan. The room where skeins of thread, spiritual texts, nested eggs, and boxes of feathers blurred the line between her art and her life is intact, and you can stand in it.

All of this gave the Foundation an archive's worth of new material: freshly scanned photographs, exhibition films, a documentary, and photography from Kohler so good our existing site couldn't do it justice.

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Rebuilding the loom

The identity had held, so we left it alone and rebuilt everything underneath it. We re-engineered how artwork displays across the site to let the new photography breathe at full scale, then made the architecture flexible enough to keep absorbing whatever comes next: the collected work, a tour of the preserved studio, the documentary, a news section that keeps filling up. Most recently, with a group exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Twelve years in, the work isn't finished. Neither is the Foundation's story. Our job is to keep giving it somewhere to go.