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Walker Art Center's Drawn Here: Contemporary Design in Conversation Series Presents Sneak Preview of New Documentary Film Typeface

The Walker Art Center series

Drawn Here: Contemporary Design in Conversation

returns in November with a special sneak preview of

Typeface

, a new documentary film by Justine Nagan. The film will screen on Thursday, November 6 at 7 pm, followed by a post-screening discussion with Nagan; author, St. Paul–based designer, and letterpress guru Bill Moran, Blinc Publishing; and Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum technical director Greg Corrigan. Copresented by AIGA Minnesota and Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

It has been said that, in an age of the virtual, our desire for tactile experiences becomes even more pronounced. This seems true for many graphic designers and artists who seek more hands-on experiences by putting down the mouse and instead setting type by hand, inking a press, and pulling a print—working directly with the materials and printing methods from an era before desktop publishing, digital type foundries, and other forms of computer-aided design. Although the heyday of wood type was more than a century ago, its sustained revival and preservation carries on today. In Typeface, Nagan chronicles this effort by documenting the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

The Hamilton Manufacturing Company began producing wood type in 1880 and within 20 years became the largest such foundry in the United States. Now operated by volunteers of the Two Rivers Historical Society, the Hamilton Museum is the only such institution dedicated to the preservation, study, production, and printing of wood type. With 1.5 million pieces and more than 1,000 styles and sizes, the Hamilton’s is one of the premier wood-type collections in the world. Not just host to static holdings of preserved artifacts behind glass, the museum is an educational center for letterpress workshops for designers and artists from across the Midwest and around the country, and a place where the last generation of skilled men and women who once created these intricate fonts—now in their seventies and eighties—can share their knowledge of this enduring craft.

Tickets to the screening are $10 ($5 Walker, AIGA, and MCBA members) and are available at walkerart.org/tickets or by calling 612.375.7600. Both the screening and discussion take place in the Walker Cinema.