What the work is
Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, curator, writer, critic and educator. She holds the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she is the founding director of the Graphic Design M.F.A. program and director of the Center for Design Thinking. She was Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, and became Curator Emerita after 30 years. She has written many books on graphic design and contributed to Print, Eye, I.D., Metropolis and The New York Times.
How it was made
At Cooper Union, which she entered in 1981 as a fine art student, Lupton discovered graphic design and the expressive potential of typography. After graduating she became curator of the newly founded Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography. Working with limited resources and an interest in do-it-yourself culture, she built visual histories of graphic design in which objects, images and text served as both the method of communication and the subject of inquiry.
She began writing critically about typography and design at this time, using a post-structuralist framework to see design as embedded in political, economic and social contexts. She has cited Saussure, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault as informing her work, in a more populist form than theirs. In 1992 she joined Cooper Hewitt as curator of contemporary design.
What works
Her exhibitions range widely. Mixing Messages (1996 to 1997) surveyed American graphic design from 1980 to 1995. Mechanical Brides looked at objects such as the washing machine, telephone and typewriter. How Posters Work used more than 125 posters from the Cooper Hewitt collection. Beauty, the 2016 Design Triennial, presented seven kinds of beauty through the work of 63 designers and teams.
Her writing reaches several audiences. Thinking with Type appeared in 2004, with revised and expanded editions in 2010 and 2024, and is subtitled as a guide for designers, writers, editors and students. She has written books for a variety of audiences.
What does not
Her exhibitions and books are known here mostly by title and date. This brief has no attendance or sales figures and says little about what any individual book argues. Her post-structuralist position comes down to one idea she has put in her own words: that typography and architecture are not neutral containers for the content or programs they are thought to accommodate. This brief does not trace how that idea shaped any particular exhibition.
What it influenced
D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006) was co-written with MICA graduate students during the early-2000s boom in self-help books. It showcased ordinary people designing their own work, from blog pages to book covers. A line quoted about the idea: people no longer just eat food, they present it, and they do not just buy T-shirts, they sell them.
Her teaching left a structure behind. She chaired MICA’s undergraduate graphic design program from 1997 to 2002, then launched the M.F.A. program in 2003 and has directed it since. Recognition includes the AIGA Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 2007 and a fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
Is it worth your time
Yes, for anyone who wants to understand graphic design as a field with a history, a critical vocabulary and teachable methods. Start with Thinking with Type for typography and D.I.Y. for the argument that design belongs to non-professionals as well. Look elsewhere for detailed accounts of individual exhibitions.
