collage, brass grommets. Courtesy of the artist.
FROM KOLAJ 30
Steven McCarthy’s Artist Portfolio
Falcon Heights, Minnesota, USA
Steven McCarthy’s work has long stood at the confluence of graphic design, art, writing and self-publishing. In artist books and installations such as “Wee Go Library”, the artist remixes written and visual culture. In 2020, McCarthy purchased four, 30-foot by 40-foot billboard vinyls and set about collaging them.
A portfolio of McCarthy’s work appears in Kolaj 30. To see the complete Artist Portfolio, SUBSCRIBE to Kolaj Magazine or Get a Copy of the Issue.
collage, brass grommets. Courtesy of the artist.
My work explores the idea of authorship, and collage is ideal for this because it provides both parameters and opportunities. I limited my sources to four billboards, and to them alone. While the medium of vinyl billboards is new to me, the approach to rearranging image and language is part of a decades-long artistic pursuit.
collage, brass grommets. Courtesy of the artist.
A portfolio of McCarthy’s work appears in Kolaj 30. To see the complete Artist Portfolio, SUBSCRIBE to Kolaj Magazine or Get a Copy of the Issue.
Steven McCarthy holds a MFA in Design from Stanford University and a BFA in art from Bradley University. His long-standing interest in theories of design authorship, as both scholar and practitioner, has led to lectures, exhibits, publications and grant-funded research on six continents. He has been in over 125 exhibitions and his artist’s books are in the collections of Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, University of California-Los Angeles and Berkeley, University of Washington, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry at the University of Iowa. McCarthy is a professor of graphic design at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus. Learn more at faculty.design.umn.edu/mccarthy.