This retrospective is an overview on one of the most versatile and prolific designers of the 20th century, John Alcorn (1935-1992).
With the display of hundreds of images preserved in the Alcorn archive, this digital exhibition is an effort to explore the creative process behind his multifaceted visual inventions and the aspects of his work that are still essential today, even in a field dominated by digital and virtual technologies.
The life and work of John Alcorn is here briefly presented and partitioned in four stages: from his debut up to the mid-Fifties, his career as a freelance designer and illustrator in the Sixties (with a focus on the seminal role he played in the flourishing of the psychedelic style movement), the Italian period of the Seventies up to his return to the United States in 1977 and, lastly, the artist’s final period.
The remarkable variety of the artist’s production is divided in four sections. The advertising works and the editorial covers, which characterized most of Alcorn’s career and left us some memorable pieces of everyday art. Illustrations include other miscellaneous pieces of production, less easy to classify. Finally, the last part is dedicated to a variety of unpublished works, presented here in an effort to reveal the artist’s creative processes.
Over the course of his career Alcorn worked in a wide range of mediums. The large amount of preparatory studies conserved in the archive testify the work behind every project of such prodigiously prolific artist. From the material exposed, it’s possible to analyze how Alcorn combined his creativity and talent to produce a hard-hitting communication. This section goes through the different techniques and styles tailored to suit every project’s needs and examines the sources from which he derived his inspiration.
Throughout John Alcorn’s work, a manual dexterity and a tactile sensivity towards artist’s materials played a defining role, and for this reason the following section is dedicated to drafts – original drawings, preparatory sketches on parchment paper and a number of unpublished works. This material gives a revealing view of the working phases employed that are still essential in today’s digital world. A special evidence is also given to the ability of the artist to reuse some old images and create variations to his earlier ideas.
This section highlights some of the most relevant aspects of Alcorn’s work: the themes that recur in his oeuvre, revealing a strong connection between visual production and experience of the world (women, flowers); the shapes that illustrate a process of design closely related to an artisanal modus operandi (lettering, logos); the outcomes, that is the most relevant products of Alcorn’s work (Children’s books, Book jackets). A final section is dedicated to The Rizzoli Revolution.
A selection of some of the most relevant images from the archive of John Alcorn is here presented. The images are classified in categories, click on the labels to reorder them.
