A few of the thousands and thousands of signs from Saturday’s Women’s March in New York. I have never seen so many signs or people in one place.
You can also follow Vernacular Typography on Twitter and Instagram if you’re into that sort of thing.
VERNACULAR MEATOGRAPHY
Vegetarians, avert your gaze.
Fewer things go better together than meat and whatever is next to meat.
In the open dining rooms of many a Texas meatery, that companion to meat just so happens to be typography (printed, painted, scrawled, drawn, lettered, what have you).
The signs of these establishments are honest and direct. In all shapes, styles, and formats (and sometimes obscured by decades of smokey oak) they unequivocally point the way to meat.
What follows is a pictorial survey of the meat and corresponding typography & lettering of some of the finest BBQ I have ever known.
2014 SIGNS, LETTERS, AND THINGS
Photos and things from January – December, 2014
FAUX OLD TIMEY SIGNAGE
The streets of DUMBO turned into a Cold War-era film set via anachronistic signage for the filming of Steven Spielberg’s St. James Place.
MONTRÉAL PREVIEW
A quick preview of lettering and typography in Montréal. Because of Quebec’s strict language laws, French is the dominant language on street signs and in commercial signage.
Multi-lingual signs in Israel (here & here) and Ireland (here).
NEW ORLEANS PREVIEW
An assorted sample of vernacular typography and lettering found recently in New Orleans. There’s no single dominant style of lettering, but rather a mix of everything (hand painted, hand scrawled, fading ghost ads–many layered over even older ghost signs, tile, neon, and about any other type of signage imaginable). The connecting thread seems to be the omnipresent plastic beaded necklaces twisted and dangling over most signs.
Also, beignets.
SARONY
Recent construction has revealed the ghostly remnants of an ad applied to the side of 37 Union Square West.
The ornate sign, partially obscured by a window frame, was illegible on its own, but a Library of Congress image of Union Square West from 1894 shows a clearer view of the same swirly signature, which reads Sarony. Below his signature, an even fainter “Portraits” is (barely) visible.
Napoleon Sarony was a Canadian-born artist and lithographer living in New York. He moved to Europe in the 1850s for formal artistic training and later learned wet plate photography from his brother, a successful commercial photographer in England.
In 1866, he moved back to New York with the intention of starting a photo supply office. Instead, he returned to photography, focusing on celebrity portraits. In 1871, he expanded his business to 37 Union Square West. The space served as a studio, gallery, and salon d’art.
It was there that he set up elaborate backdrops to photograph some of the largest stars of the time (his images of Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, and Mark Twain among the most iconic). He would pay celebrities for the exclusive rights to their portraits and sell the reproductions. He published his cabinet cards on site, each marked with the same Sarony signature that hung outside the building.
His portraits became so popular that his style was often mimicked or outright copied. In 1884, Sarony successfully sued the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company for selling unauthorized lithographs of this Oscar Wilde portrait. The landmark case extended copyright protection to photography, and Sarony v. Burrow Lithograph helped establish photography as an artistic expression rather one of mere reproduction.
Sarony moved his main gallery to Fifth Avenue in 1885 and sold off his back stock of negatives to a former rival before his death in 1896.
A Berenice Abbott photo from 1938 shows the building with its post-Sarony exterior.
At some point in the 1950s or 60s, the building was recovered with the strange facade that remains today. The fading Sarony Portraits might be covered up again, but for now a little piece of history peaks out.
PUERTO RICO
A few shots from a recent trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was interesting to see how the buildings and typography had changed since a visit in 2007.
Also, mofongo.
PHILADELPHIA PREVIEW
A Philadelphia section has just been added to the main archive (HERE), with photos primarily taken along the Market-Frankford SEPTA line in West Philadelphia.
The area is predominantly residential, though the population has dwindled in recent years. There are small commercial clusters around the El stops, but lots are mostly vacant and storefronts boarded up and decaying. Work from public art initiatives like the incredible Mural Arts Program pop up all over the city and brighten blighted areas and transform public space.
Here’s a quick preview:
Here’s an interesting interactive city map that gives a larger view of the vacancies in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods (link).
PERFECTION IS STANDARD, MISTAKES COST EXTRA
If you’re around the Chelsea area in the next few days, stop by the Joshua Liner Gallery to check out the ICY sign shop with work by Sean Barton, Lew Blum, Justin Green, Mike Lee, Dan Murphy, Steve Powers, Alexis Ross, and Matt Wright.
In addition to the work along the walls and the tornado of grocery style signs, there are work tables and nooks set up in a carefully curated chaos (the flotsam and jetsam accumulated throughout the course of the show).
The most interesting parts are the stray bits, the practice marks, doodles, and guidelines that are normally invisible or go unnoticed in a finished sign.
ICY makes the signs that should be all over New York. There’s a life to sign painting that can’t be recreated in cheaply cut vinyl and mass produced signage.
ICY Signs + Stephen Powers
Joshua Liner Gallery
540 West 28th Street
Through November 16