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Rebeca Méndez: Selections from the Permanent Collection of Architecture and Design

Text by Aaron Betsky, curator of Architecture and Design, SFMOMA

With a gesture and a caress, Rebeca Méndez draws graphic design away from the cool world of lines and letter faces and into a more sensual reality. Her designs are alive with color and gauzy with suggestion. Relying on a palette of soft tones, a language of curves and sweeping arcs, and the mutating of images through the application of screens, Méndez massages her posters, books, and identity materials into designed objects that seem to have bodies.

This exhibition—organized by SFMOMA Curator of Architecture and Design Aaron Betsky—presents approximately twenty books and posters that demonstrate Méndez’s sensual treatment of the printed page.

Méndez is both an artist and a graphic designer. She is a master at organizing information into minimal yet clear blocks. What is distinctive about her work is what happens around and underneath this information. In one catalogue for Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, for example, she perforated the pages so that it can be read the usual way or assembled into collages by separating the book at a center horizon line and reading top and bottom in different sequences.

In more recent work, Méndez has adopted the curved containing lines and metallic types associated with the revival of 1970’s imagery, but she softens and heightens the impact of the works by washing it with fluorescent yellows and greens. Her catalogue for the Bill Viola retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (coming to SFMOMA in 1999) is infused with the deep colors used by Viola so that the book pays homage to the magic of the artist’s work.�

Rebeca Méndez continues the series of exhibitions of female graphic designers whose work is included in SFMOMA’s permanent collection of architecture and design.