Contact: Christie McNeal
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Austin Grove, a senior art/graphic design major from Clinton at Mississippi State University, and assistant professor of graphic design Cassie Hester both recently had posters accepted to the international Italian Poster Biennial Exhibition.
Grove completed his poster in Hester’s Typography II class.
“Being selected for the Italian Poster Biennial is an impressive achievement,” said Hester. “The poster Austin designed will be displayed alongside posters designed by some of the world’s best. We, the Department of Art and graphic design faculty, are very proud.”
Only 174 posters were selected out of 2,200 entries; just three of these were from North America.
The submissions were judged by a distinguished panel of 11 international designers including Luba Lukova and Yossi Lemel, two internationally renowned names in graphic design.
Grove’s poster was submitted to Category B of the biennial with the theme “WAR / Homo homini lupus.”
The graphic design senior interpreted this to mean the idea of internal conflict being the cause for external conflicts, wars and violence.
Grove’s design process began with collaging and sketching.
“I was really interested in letting the process be very intuitive,” he said. “I wanted to just start making things while thinking about conflict and see what happened. Eventually, I settled on trying to represent conflict typographically—what does the word ‘conflict’ look like?”
Later, he began to research the word and came across a quote from Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.”
“It talked about the duality of war—how confusing, how terrible, how heroic, how cowardly, how thrilling, how boring, how devastating war is,” he said. “Conflict is always two-sided. It’s never simple. And eventually these were sort of the ideas I was trying to communicate.” See Grove’s poster in the online gallery at http://www.italianposterbiennal.it/selected-b/
Hester’s poster was originally designed for a visiting artist to campus, Joey Hannaford, and was accepted to Category A, published posters. See Hester’s poster at http://www.italianposterbiennal.it/selected-a
The Italian Poster Biennial aims to focus public attention on social issues through poster design and serves as an international stage for professionals to discuss the state of art on poster and social graphic design.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.