Steven McCarthy, MFA

  • BIO

    Steven McCarthy earned a BFA in art from Bradley University and an MFA in design from Stanford University. He is a professor emeritus of graphic design at the University of Minnesota. His long-standing interest in theories of design authorship – as both scholar and practitioner – has led to lectures, exhibits, publications and grant-funded research on six continents. His book on the topic, The Designer As... Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating was published in 2013.

    McCarthy’s art and design has been in over 140 juried and invitational exhibitions and competitions, and his artist’s books are in these collections, among others: Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, UCLA, University of California–Berkeley, University of Washington, University of Cincinnati, Bainbridge Island Art Museum, Walker Art Center, the Banff Centre, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry at the University of Iowa. In 2017 he received the Minnesota Book Artist Award.

    McCarthy has published academic papers in Visible Language, Visual Communication, Design and Culture, Design Issues, AIGA Dialectic, The Design Journal and She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, and he writes occasionally for London-based Eye magazine.

    Learn more at: www.stevenmccarthy.design

Artist Statement

Collage is a method of combining disparate visual elements, typically cut and torn paper glued to a substrate. Existing images and texts are then remediated into new meaning and expression through juxtaposition. Often credited to the early and mid-twentieth century artwork of Georges Braque, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, for example, collage methodology has since been embraced across media. Collage-making enables me to take elements from the past and re- mix them into speculations on an unknown future. In a way, collage is ‘un’graphic design as it re- verse engineers the considered layouts of others. I delight in proposing new meaning and emotion through image and text relationships.

I have a history of both working in collage as a medium and theorizing on the what the process of collage might mean. My collage work has been manifest in traditional paper-based cut and- paste techniques and in digital artifacts resulting from software code manipulation, montage, interactivity and animation. This has resulted in collage based artist’s books, free-standing collages the size of posters, assemblages of relief materials, and large scale collages that exist in the environment. I have written for and have had works featured in Montréal-based Kojaj magazine. I received the Minnesota Book Artist Award for my collage/assemblage work Wee Go Library.

My collage process involves three distinct stages: harvest, flux and commitment. When I harvest, I mine books, magazines, junk mail, packaging, etc. for texts, images, patterns, colors, textures and other graphic and literal content. I tear, cut, compile and group when I harvest. During the flux stage, I create numerous compositions with all of the elements still in play. Rarely do I have a specific intention – this speculative stage allows relationships to emerge, humor to present itself, critical commentary to be expressed. As the collage takes final shape – nothing is glued yet – I photograph it to record it at its resolved state, referring to the snapshot as a guide.