Hall of Femmes Release Party in New York City

If you're in New York next week, make sure to check out the book launch party of the Hall of Femmes project, a new book series highlighting the contributions of women in design. Presented by the Art Directors Club, the party will be hosted at the ADC Gallery (106 West 29th St., New York) next week Tuesday, June 28. The event is free and open to the public.

Hall of Femmes is a project initiated by Samira Bouabana and Angela Tillman Sperandio of Swedish design studio Hjärta Smärta to draw attention to women art directors and graphic designers. A book series published by Oyster Press is being produced within the project, with each volume portraying a specific designer and her work through in-depth interviews and previously unpublished images.    

To celebrate the first four books in the series, which recognize the work of Ruth Ansel, Lillian Bassman, Carin Goldberg and Paula Scher, ADC will host the launch event in cooperation with The Consulate General of Sweden, Oyster Press and Hjärta Smärta. Signed books will be available for purchase at the event.    

Hall of Femmes: Ruth Ansel 
The first publication in the series features the legendary art director Ruth Ansel.  In the 1960s, when she was just 24, she and Bea Feitler became co-art directors of Harper’s Bazaar.  She later went onto serve as art director at The New York Times Magazine in the 1970s and Vanity Fair in the 1980s, each time being the first woman to hold those positions. Ansel will be inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame later this fall. In Hall of Femmes: Ruth Ansel, the celebrated designer gives an intimate retrospectives of her life and works, talking about a professional career extending over 50 years where she has worked with and nurtured talents such as Marvin Israel, Alexey Brodovitch, Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz.  Ruth Ansel has created some of the most iconic images of our time and been a part of the biggest shifts in editorial history.  

Hall of Femmes: Carin Goldberg
Carin Goldberg started her professional career at the end of the 1970s as a designer at CBS Television and CBS Records, a period when, according to Goldberg, you had to be “a cool, irreverent, experimental, hungry, talented smart ass.” She was awarded the prestigious AIGA Gold Medal in 2009, an honor considered to be the highest in America recognizing an exemplary career in graphic design.  Goldberg has been a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) since 1999 and served on its board of directors from 2006–2009.  In November 2010, a retrospective of her work and career was exhibited at Musée Géo-Charles, Échirolles, France.  She has taught Third Year Typography and Senior Portfolio Thesis at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for 28 years, and is one of the first recipients of the Art Directors Club Grandmasters Award for Excellence in Education (2008).  

Hall of Femmes: Lillian Bassman 
Lillian Bassman began her career as an assistant to Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1940s, at the epicenter of the American magazine culture’s Golden Age. In 1945, she was appointed art director for the newly launched Junior Bazaar, a fashion magazine for teenagers which, under her direction, functioned as an experimental workshop that became a hot-bed for young creative talents such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank and Paul Himmel. Bassman later took up photography at the suggestion of Alexey Brodovitch himself, and went on to become one of the most influential photographers of her generation. Her photographs have been exhibited around the world and published into two books. Still working at the age of 93, Lillian Bassman is currently finishing her third book, due out next year.  

Hall of Femmes: Paula Scher 
Paula Scher began her design career at Atlantic and CBS Records in the 1970s. In 1984, she co-founded Koppel & Scher, and in 1991 joined the design firm Pentagram as a partner. Scher has worked with identity and branding systems, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a broad range of clients. She was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1998, and was awarded the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA medal, in recognition of her contributions to the design field in 2001. Five years later, she was awarded the Type Directors Club Medal for significant contributions to the life, art, and craft of typography.

Images courtesy Art Directors Club.