Museum of Contemporary Craft invited local graphic designer and educator Kate Bingaman-Burt and designer Clifton Burt to create an exhibition from materials often overlooked in museum collections. Through a process of sorting, sifting, and re-organizing, Bingaman-Burt and Burt created an installation using printed materials and ephemera from the Museum’s archives. Each section of the installation reveals different elements of the history of printing and graphic design in Portland, and how such printed materials can construct and communicate institutional identity.

Today, “collateral” refers to a suite of printed materials created to brand an organization. Focusing primarily on the 1940s through the 1970s, the collateral materials on view provide a simple study of both intentionally and unintentionally designed pieces in the pre-desktop publishing era. The critical role of printshops is revealed through designed print pieces, such as invitations, posters and letterhead, and then contrasted alongside office paperwork – handwritten artist statements, pastel-toned invoices and receipts speckled with red “sale” dots, for example. In an installation designed to show the visual impact of printed materials, the guest curators engage typography from the mundane to the meticulously designed, showing how graphic language functions in a range of types of printed collateral.