art

Via Oxford Art Factory & Fecal Face

Avant Garde was a magazine notable for graphic and logogram design by Herb Lubalin. The magazine had 16 issues and was published from January 1968 to July 1971.

From January, 1968, through July, 1971, Ginzburg published Avant Garde, which like Eros, an earlier publishing attempt, was a handsome hardbound periodical. While it could not be termed obscene, but it was filled with creative imagery often caustically critical of American society and government, sexual themes, and (for the time) crude language. One cover featured a naked pregnant woman; another had a parody of Willard's famous patriotic painting, "The Spirit of '76", with a woman and a black man.

Avant Garde had a modest circulation but was extremely popular in certain circles, including New York’s advertising and editorial art directors. Herbert F. Lubalin (1918–1981), a post-modern design guru, was Ginzburg's collaborator on his four best-known magazines, including Avant Garde which gave birth to a well-known typeface of the same name. It was originally intended primarily for use in logos: the first version consisted solely of 26 capital letters. It was inspired by Ginzburg and his wife, designed by Lubalin, and realized by Lubalin's assistants and Tom Carnese, one of Lubalin's partners. It is characterized by geometrically perfect round strokes; short, straight lines; and an extremely large number of ligatures and negative kerning. The International Typefont Corporation(ITC) (of which Lubalin was a founder) released a full version in 1970.

An article on folk music written by United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a topic in the congressional hearings on his attempted impeachment in 1970.

98 Bowery is the web project of Marc Miller and the best way to tell you about what he does is to let him say it. Below is Marc's mission statement and an assortment of images that can be found on his amazing site.

Telling stories with pictures, with ephemera and with a few carefully chosen words is what I enjoy doing best. Over the years I have been lucky to create many visual narratives during a varied career as an artist, journalist, curator, art historian and publisher. "View from the Top Floor" brings together some of these stories in a chronicle of my life and the creative world I experienced during the twenty years I lived in the top floor loft at 98 Bowery.

The Bowery from 1969 to 1989 was a low-rent refuge for artists and free spirits willing to tolerate the alcoholics and homeless men who lived on the street. These pages show this vie de bohème as remembered through pictures accumulated at the time. "View from the Top Floor" has no hard and fast rules. It is autobiography and art history. It is a stage for my friends and me. While it does not strive to be complete or objective, it unavoidably takes its place in the bigger world, tracking in part the greater story of art and music in the 1970s and 1980s, an era when culture strove to be more real and expressive, and the East Village and Lower East Side emerged as one of the world's most potent creative centers.

- Marc H. Miller

Want to waste 3 hours of your life that you'll never get back? Go to Bikini Machines, they have one of the most amazing collections of retro images I've ever seen. Be warned: Their blog is absolutely not safe work.