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

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

In 1957, at fifty years old, Lenore Tawney left a comfortable life in Chicago for a loft on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan and became a full-time artist. "I left Chicago," she wrote in her journal, "to seek a barer life, closer to reality." Over the next fifty years she quietly changed what weaving could be, lifting thread off the wall and into space. Museums collected her. Fiber artists studied her. And still, outside the field, her name never traveled as far as her influence did.

That was the situation in the fall of 2013, when Kathleen Nugent Mangan, the Foundation's executive director, first came to us. The life we got to know resists summary. Tawney had worked as a seamstress in a menswear factory, then as a proofreader in Chicago. She was widowed at thirty-six, after two years of marriage, and went on to study at the Institute of Design under the Bauhaus emigrants Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Marli Ehrman. And in her signature open-warp weavings, the gaps between threads matter as much as the threads themselves.

Her pieces are sculptural yet intimate, and they live outside the traditional confines of a canvas. No frame, no edge, nothing telling you where the work stops. It asks you to slow down and look. We believe design for artist foundations should serve the work and stay out of its way, and no artist we've worked with demanded that more than Tawney.

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 her instinct was correct, and we knew it as soon as she said it. 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, and happy to step aside and let you look at the work. 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. The 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 found 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.

The Art World Finds the 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.

Tawney believed her postcard collages weren't finished until she mailed them to someone. Twelve years in, we think about the website the same way. Keep the line taut. Get out of the way. Let the transmission through.