Painting the town red: a new exhibition of graphic art by women
This time last year, graphic designer and artist Catherine Griffiths launched a protest. The Designers Institute of New Zealand (DINZ) was staging its annual awards, and Griffiths took issue with a gender imbalance: DINZ’s top accolade, the Black Pin, had been awarded 40 times to men and only three times to women. A similar imbalance was apparent in last year’s judging panels for the awards, which contained 46 men and only 15 women.
Griffiths’s first response was to design three protest posters using the stark statistics as content, and release them into the wild on social media. She then set up the blog platform, Designers Speak (Up). This later led to an open call for posters from women designers. From Wednesday 18 September, Britomart is hosting Present Tense: Wāhine Toi Aotearoa, some of the products of that open-source poster series by women creatives that Griffiths instigated as an attempt to showcase the depth and talent of women designers.
Britomart Works on Paper with Phantom Billstickers will showcase 94 Wāhine Toi posters, printed at large scale, rotating every Wednesday for four weeks from 18 September to 16 October, 2019.
Read the full interview with Griffiths here.
Part of Artweek in the city centre.
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