NOTES FROM ARTIST ALISON KING
This is my first show to hang alongside such a broad international cohort. I’m honored to have been tapped to interpret a nearby Wright Site in my hometown of Scottsdale. When they asked me to contribute a poster to the show, they instantly had me at W.P.A!
I’ve drawn plenty of Arizona architecture in previous posters but I immediately knew that I wanted to focus on something Taliesin West has that most other Wright Sites don’t have, which is the Fellowship.
As a professor of design history I felt a great responsibility to be true to time, people and place, yet I also wanted to create a timeless vignette that reflected the spirit of Taliesin West, no matter what the decade. I dug through Pedro Guerrero’s photographs from the WPA era for inspiration on how the original Fellows experienced the site, then I sketched in the plaza at Taliesin West to embed myself in the way the space is used today.
Since a WPA travel poster style was requested, the call to action to
Experience Fellowship
for yourself was central -- not just to see it, but to open up and feel what it’s like to cooperate together on an enduring work of art. Are they building this place for the first time? Restoring it 80 years later? That’s open to interpretation, as are many other ambiguous aspects that I've woven through this deceptively simple piece.
I especially like the (purely accidental) contrast between night and day in the renderings of Taliesin West in Arizona and Taliesin in Wisconsin. Rory Kurtz and I could not have planned that better; they go well as a pair. As you get to know my poster in person, you'll discover how it's all about the dancing edges and the push-pull of space using a limited color palette with white as the star -- supported by Pantone’s color of the year
Living Coral
.
All of the hand lettering was custom designed specifically for this poster. If you purchase a print just drop me a line and I’ll tell you a great bit more about it with a printable artist’s statement.
I hope you can come by Taliesin West to add some of these special new 18X24” posters to your collection.
~ALISON KING
