New logo that goes with new museum
This has been a year of change for the Santa Monica Museum of Art. It left Santa Monica and its longtime space at Bergamot Station and is scheduled to open next year in a downtown L.A. industrial building. In May, the museum changed its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles — ICA LA.
The museum is also hard at work on a new look — and for that, Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford was enlisted.
Bradford, who first showed work at the museum in 2001, donated his time to the project. “It’s a really generous act,” says ICA LA Executive Director Elsa Longhauser.
For the ICA LA logo, the artist harked back to an important piece of Southern California design history: the bright letterpress street posters popularized by the Colby Printing Co., which shut down in 2012.
“Mark took those block letters that you see on those posters — and he rips and he tears and he layers them,” Longhauser says. “Each letter is a work of art.”
Simple, leaning block letters have been sliced in ways that evoke movement on a yellow background.
“I wanted to be part of propelling ICA LA and its long history in Santa Monica forward as it moves to its new home downtown,” Bradford said in a statement. “The logo and treatment reference merchant posters found from L.A.’s Westside to Eastside, which point to the fluidity of both economics and culture.”
The new logo also evokes the wear and tear of paper in an urban setting, something that is certainly inspired by Bradford’s own practice.
He has long been intrigued by the bold, declarative language of merchant posters and has used posters as primary source material for his deeply layered collages. Once he created a series devoted to exploring the forms of the alphabet.
Bradford’s design will serve as a point of inspiration for the museum’s new building, a 12,700-squarefoot former textile manufacturing plant on East 7th Street downtown.
L.A.-based architect Kulapat Yantrasast, founder of wHY Architecture, is developing conceptual drawings inspired by the look.
“I can’t say for certain whether the building will be yellow,” Longhauser says. “But we’re talking with Kulapat and his team about how we can manifest this identity in the building.”
The ICA LA is scheduled to open in fall 2017.