Mark Addison Smith’s design specialization is typographic storytelling: creating illustrative text to convey a visual narrative through printed matter, artist’s books, and site installations. His book, Years Yet Yesterday, has been accessioned into more than 50 permanent collections and library archives, including Tate Library, Getty Research Institute, MoMA Franklin Furnace Artists’ Book Collection, Guggenheim Library and Archives, Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Art Library at the V&A, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum & National Portrait Gallery Library Artists’ Book Collection. Other permanent collections include Kinsey Institute Art Collection and Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City. He most recently contributed a chapter to Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences. In this interview, Mark talks of his life, influences, and on-going projects.
Editor’s note: This interview first appeard in Designer magazine (Summer 2017, Vol. 42, No. 2).
Daily, since November 23, 2008, Mark has been listening in on strangers' conversations and drawing their words as black and white, type-forward drawings, never missing a day with over 5000 drawings his ongoing archive.
Tell us a little bit about your background.
I grew up in Fayette County a small community just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Fayette County has good schools, no real drama, a little bit of gossip, tons of families, a couple of chicken restaurants, and a dollar movie theatre. I grew up on farmland surrounded by lots of cows and views for miles. My sister and I named every cow in our pasture! Big Mama, an aggressive but rather sweet-natured leader-of-the-pack who would eat ears of corn out of our hands, was our favorite.
I graduated from the charter class of my high school and was the senior class salutatorian. There’s a picture of my graduating class still hanging up in the lobby! I was heavily involved in art in high school. Growing up gay in a small town, art was my safety net—I was always the sensitive-but-smart, artsy kid, for those who needed a label. And, I was incredibly quiet and reserved; I took my artwork seriously, dedicating most of my free time to studio projects even way back then. Years later, as an adult in graduate school, I found a way to use typography to loudly share personal and anecdotal narratives about my youth; so, typography—specifically, handwriting—provided a future voice for my seemingly quiet and insular ways.
Back in the day, we used to cover our high school textbooks with mock dust jackets created from paper grocery bags in order to keep the hardback covers safe from wear and tear. As a reward for covering her books, my sister used to let me decorate her grocery bag book covers with hand lettering. I’d open up the movie section of the newspaper and graffiti movie logos with an ink pen all over her book jackets. I was pretty good at studying and reproducing the type, so this was probably when I first started paying attention to the tone and messaging within illustrative, iconic, display type. My favorites were the Modern weights…serifs and hairlines, whew. I also shamelessly loved Mistral, Quicksilver, the Motter weights, all of those simulated handwriting scripts that were popularized in iconographic ’80s films but feel so wonderfully dated now.
Growing up, I was smitten with and inspired by movies, and still am. My childhood bedroom was wallpapered with movie one-sheets that I’d buy for a quarter from the local video store. Jonathan Demme, Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese, hands down, had the best title sequences in their films. I still revere, and continue to learn from, the designers behind many of those sequences: Pablo Ferro, Randall Balsmeyer, Mimi Everett, and Saul Bass.
As an undergraduate you studied Film and Video at Georgia State University. What did you do immediately after graduating?
After graduating, funny enough, I managed a movie theatre while I figured out how to best use my film degree. One winter, DreamWorks put out a call through the Georgia Film Office for art department crew on a motion picture that would be filming in the Atlanta area for three months. I applied for a position, hoping that my crossover skills in film and design would be of benefit. I was hired as a production assistant in their production office, and eventually worked on-set for the three months of filming as assistant to the on-set dresser. An on-set dresser is responsible for the placement of set pieces and props within the camera frame and works alongside the production design team and the script supervisor to maintain visual interest and continuity each time the director yells “action!”
It was an amazing, impressionable experience for me. It was like the circus had come to town and I had been chosen for the sideshow. I met so many talented, giving, wonderfully weird individuals who were actively working in a collaborative and artistic environment. I continued to work on music videos and feature films for the next year, until I was hired full time as the Programming Director at IMAGE Film & Video Center.
At IMAGE, a non-profit organization fostering independent film arts in Atlanta and the southeast, I programmed monthly film screenings and discussions, oversaw weekly classes and hired instructors, and assisted—and eventually directed—the Atlanta Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which, at the time, was the largest LGBTQ festival in the southeast.
Why did you decide to pursue a graduate degree in Design & Communication at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago? Was this a switching of gears or a natural progression towards developing interests? Did the desire for storytelling emerge from the film studies?
For four years at IMAGE, I was setting up events and programming for creative-types and really became immersed in the arts community of Atlanta. I reached a turning point where I wanted to use the knowledge that I had obtained—in arts administration, research, programming and curatorial practice, grant writing, networking—for my own creative endeavors, and graduate school seemed like a logical next step.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago was a good fit for me because it’s such a playground of interdisciplinary learning and their design program encourages innovative approaches to traditional design rhetoric. The SAIC Visual Communication MFA program is rooted in narrative architecture and storytelling, so I was able to draw from my film background, specifically my interests in personal narrative and typography, to inform my design practice.
But, my decision to focus on typography and design in graduate school was firmly planted in my childhood; specifically, my adoration for movie posters and movie type.
And Then She’s Like / And He Goes group exhibition, A+D Gallery, Chicago (featuring works from the You Look Like the Right Type series incorporating text from overheard conversations, each work measures 7 x 11 inches) Artist Mark Addison Smith with an installation of 58 of the drawings from an archive of 4,000+ daily conversation drawings. Drawings from You Look Like The Right Type: It’s semiotics, so it’s not quick. (November 3, 2016); I guess I met so many people I forgot your face. (June 28, 2016); And in other news—you can just let me know when you want to hear the redeeming part. (January 28, 2016); Oh my underwear’s on inside out. (October 4, 2016); They prepared us for horrible turbulence that didn’t really happen. (October 12, 2016); You need to go home and call me from your house. (January 28, 2016)
Any particular artists, designers, or teachers that were influential in your development?
In graduate school at SAIC, I worked closely with Ann Tyler, a designer and book artist who works with issues of history and memory and how the past informs our current role in activism and advocacy for human rights. She’s an incredible source of inspiration—a supportive leader and a constructive critic with the ability to make those working with her feel as if they can change the world with their ideas.
Kay Rosen was another graduate advisor and force of influence and support at SAIC. She taught me the value of rulemaking within my practice…and how a set of visual and conceptual constructs can actually lead toward more iterative development. Today, I find that much of my work is archive, or even ritual, based. I’ll set up a task or a rule and carry it out as a durational project to produce an iterative collection that resonates louder than a single one-off.
You’ve been busy—and your projects often take years. Could you talk about your process and the projects: You Look Like the Right Type, Years Yet Yesterday and The Queer Writing on the Bathroom Wall.
All three projects are durational, meaning that they’ve spanned many years and many cities in their additive development.
You Look Like the Right Type is a daily drawing project that I began on November 23, 2008, which places direct-quote fragments from overheard conversations into drawings infusing black and white hand lettering with interpretive line illustration. Each and every single day, I redraw exact-dialogue fragments from overheard conversations as 7x11-inch India ink illustrations. The rules are always the same: each drawing must include overheard dialogue from that day, the quote must be exact, and the speaker must be someone, alive and in the flesh, other than myself. Sometimes I’ll draw several works per day, but I always draw at least one. To date, I’ve amassed well over 4,000 drawings and the collection keeps growing. I post one drawing to represent each day on YouLookLikeTheRightType.com and on Instagram @markaddisonsmith.
For gallery display, I combine the single YLLTRT illustrations into larger, theme-based conversations between people who have never met or exchanged words about topics never directly spoken. When grouped together as modular narratives, the black and white drawings start having gray scale conversations with one another across time, place, age, gender—I like to think of these dynamics as the who, what, when, where, why, and how of journalistic-narrative documentation. And the audience adds to the conversation by filling in what’s left unsaid within the narrative.
It’s funny to me that the work is about highlighting the words from strangers…and I owe a stranger credit for the title of the collective work. In 2008, I had just finished teaching a class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was walking toward the train in the downtown Loop. A young woman ran up to me and asked me for a cigarette. I don’t smoke. She looked me up and down, snapped her finger and said, “Ahh, you look like the right type,” before taking off down the street. I thought about our conversation on my train ride home and redrew our words later that night. Since then, every single day, I’ve redrawn the words of others.
Years Yet Yesterday is another collection of drawings—again, using spoken-word fragments translated into text-based, hand-lettered drawings. This time, I’ve pulled language from gay activist Larry Kramer’s 2004 call-to-action speech The Tragedy of Today’s Gays and translated his words into a series of black and white colorblind eye charts documenting the past decade of the ongoing AIDS crisis.
In this set, each drawing is dedicated to a letter in the alphabet, and drawn using three words—rewritten hundreds of times to push agendas of immediacy and urgency—that appear in Kramer’s original speech. The three words within each panel can be translated in any order to invite viewers to reflect upon a decade-long sliver of the 30+ ongoing years of the AIDS crisis while simultaneously questioning the past and the future of activism. Kramer’s words, initially fueled by an unsupportive political administration, also serve as lenses for our current, uncertain political state. Three drawings from the series in particular, I think, resonate against today’s terrifying post-election climate: E—Expected Elected Emergencies, H—Horror Highest Hope, and W—Wrong Way Washington.
Interestingly, this series, like You Look Like the Right Type, has a time element, as I was working against a ticking clock to complete the Years Yet Yesterday set prior to the 10-year anniversary of Kramer’s November 7, 2004 speech. I found that Kramer’s speech, which is probably an hour or so in duration, did not include any words beginning with an X or a Z. When dealing with a topic as diffusely complicated as the AIDS pandemic, it makes sense conceptually that the puzzle would be missing key pieces or definitive answers. So, this abecedary is incomplete with only 24 letters. To me, the 24 drawings represent hours in a day, which accumulate to years, which become the decade that I’m investigating.
From the Years Yet Yesterday series, incorporating three words, rewritten hundreds of times, from Larry Kramer’s 2004 speech, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays. From a series of 24 drawings, each work measures 22 x 15 inches. Above: W—Wrong Way Washington (detail, 2014). Page 12: H—Horror Highest Hope (2014). Page 13: H—Horror Highest Hope (detail, 2014); Mark Addison Smith holding drawing of R—Research Requires Response (2014)
Over the last decade, I have also been researching hate-speech—specifically, homophobic graffiti in restrooms throughout Midwest America. By happenstance, my investigations led me to a truck stop at the Illinois-Wisconsin border, where, in the men’s restroom, I was startled by the text gay fagget (sic) fucker die you know it’s a truck driver, scrawled in hot pink sharpie and written upside down on the wall. I became curious about the author and his intent, or rather, the baggage carried within the author’s handwritten text.
I decided to rewrite his language: I appropriated the author’s existing 18 letterforms from the wall phrase, and used his lines and angles to reconstruct the remaining, missing 34 letters for a complete uppercase and lowercase alphabet system based upon what I imagined his writing style would look like.
Then, I decided to take action against his hate speech, using his own handwriting as my tool for activism. I morphed the letterforms on top of each other to generate a homosexualized uppercase and lowercase alphabet set consisting of same-letter ligatures. I imagined them as same-sex letters having sex with each other. With my new alphabet, I went undercover, returned to the truck stop bathroom site, and inscribed my own coded text, reading: let’s face it, we’re all queer—a piece of researched graffiti from the 1970s New York City gay revolution on Christopher Street. I placed my new text, generated from my queer alphabet, directly on top of the author’s source text inside the restroom stall using digitally printed, peel-and-stick transfer lettering. My goal was to uncover the latent homosexuality within the author’s written homophobia as well as generate a queer-positive language system that the graffiti artist could not answer back…I wanted my graffiti, placed on top of his, to have the last word.
I wrote about The Queer Writing on the Bathroom Wall in Routledge Publication’s 2016 design textbook, Diversity and Design: Understanding Hidden Consequences, as a case study chapter of how I’m using typography and linguistic systems to reclaim safe space. I’m currently finalizing a chapter about my Years Yet Yesterday series for another Routledge Publication, Queering Translation, which will be released in 2017.
What is typographic storytelling? And how does it relate/connect/intersect with literature, design, art and linguistics?
Typographic storytelling is allowing the tone and messaging within type design, in my case hand-rendered lettering, to tell a story through the visual formation of letterforms and the edited pairings of words. In short, it’s relying upon the type to do the heavy lifting for conveying a narrative to an audience.
In my You Look Like the Right Type series, for example, the voices spring forth from the illustrative typography because I’ve removed context—including gender, ethnicity, and age of the speaker, as well as a concrete location and a specific topic—from each drawing. But, the speaker’s direct quote, coupled with a key illustration and typographic embellishment, moves to the forefront for audience interpretation.
Lenses, or a hint of suggestion, can wildly enhance our perception within typographic storytelling…especially since the non-traditional verbal elements are now carrying the visual weight. A friend once commented to me that the YLLTRT overheard dialogue got juicier—more loaded with implication, perhaps—once I moved to New York City in 2012. I think there might be some curious truth to that, given that New Yorkers are so forthright with speech and details.
Do you have any desire to animate your work?
I would love to see some of my You Look Like the Right Type drawings transition into animated narratives. While in graduate school, I started making artist’s books with page-flip mechanisms—similar in style to children’s books that use a split-page structure to generate multiple possibilities for reconstructing an image on a page—only mine use the bisected page to reorder grammar, syntax, and illustrative typography. I realized that my artist’s books were an extension of the editing style that I had learned in undergraduate films school: cutting on film.
I’m not sure if film schools are still physically cutting and splicing together shot footage, but that practice was formative for me and laid the groundwork for my future art practice of re-editing fragmented ideas. I have vivid memories of hundreds of film fragment bits hanging around my kitchen, taped to the walls, and my eyes burning from peering at the hand-cranked, viewfinder screen that we used for analog editing.
Something about the physicality of cutting film apart and splicing it back together to generate new movement really stuck with me, so my artist’s books and modular type pieces become a redefined framing of the edited film—a different way to cut apart a scene and splice it back together for new meaning. So, animation would change the physicality of that editing process—the physicality of the movement—but it is something that I’d be interested in trying.
What was the best advice you ever received?
I’ll pass along valuable advice from one of my graduate school professors: If you’re uncertain about an idea, generate a quick mock-up in 15 minutes and look at what you have. See if it works…you can tell a lot from a 15-minute mock up! Then, back up and assess the idea on paper (or screen) and see if it’s worth devoting the time, space, hours, and energy to make the thing.
And, more advice from the same professor: If you’re experiencing creative block, begin working. Ideas spring forth from creation, even if that initial creation is purely exploratory. And, full disclosure: this is a marvel that is almost impossible to conceive as working until you put it into practice.
I think the second bit of advice is why I appreciate my on-going You Look Like the Right Type series so much: I’ve given myself a daily assignment, as well as the daily permission to be creative. I’ll approach the daily task with a quote to find and a blank piece of paper to fill and I’ll end the day with a drawing…whatever form it takes and whatever words I’m using. So, right there, a high-pressure situation—the task of creating something from nothing—becomes effortless and enjoyable.
Mark Addison Smith, artist, drawing overheard quotes on the NYC subway, 2015. Drawings from You Look Like The Right Type: The gown opens to the front. (May 25, 2016); I’m deleting him. (July 11, 2016); We tried so many things (March 17, 2016).