On the Expanded

Megan Patty

‘Curating is not an activity that can take place in isolation,’ writes Deyan Sudjic. ‘The audience is a key part of the equation, and the techniques most critical for the curator are those that help them engage their audience.’1 Such entanglement – between content and context, designer and audience – becomes especially pronounced when graphic design is curated within a university gallery setting.

Unlike contemporary art, which, as Maria Lind suggests, is often ‘presented as if it were the result of autonomous production, carrying its own problematic’, design – particularly graphic design – is fundamentally contextual.2 It rarely emerges in isolation; rather, it is shaped by complex systems – economic, institutional, social, technological – and realised through negotiation, collaboration and constraint. Richard Hollis sets out a rather linear definition of graphic design as ‘a social activity . . . not about self-expression, but about communicating other people’s ideas’.3 I offer that the work of practitioners such as Catherine Griffiths resists this definition, and instead sits within a broader field of design and artistic expression, shaped by a range of situations and concerns. Curating this expanded field of design, then, is not about aesthetic isolation but contextual activation – foregrounding site, circulation and the conditions of production.

In a definitional sense, expanded graphic design refers to practices that move beyond traditional client–service models – encompassing publishing, performance, research, speculative imaginaries and interventions in space or language. These practices blur conventional distinctions between art and design, and often operate across multiple publics and temporalities. Graphic design practitioners, the discipline itself and the writing around it continuously grapple with definition and redefinition. James Goggin describes graphic design as ‘a distinctly in-between discipline that is both everywhere and nowhere’, suggesting that this state of ‘betweenness’ allows it ‘to talk without boundaries to a wider audience’.4 This framing underscores how the porous borders of the discipline enable an expanded field of practice – one that is not confined to fixed categories or spaces.

Yet presenting such work within an exhibition context poses curatorial challenges. As Sara De Bondt observes, ‘Exhibiting graphic design often means showing it out of its original context, stripped of its purpose, process, and audience.’5 A gallery setting – particularly within a university context – can, however, reframe this perceived dislocation. Rather than a limitation, the gallery becomes a site of inquiry and experimentation.6 The exhibition can become a way to investigate not just what graphic design looks like, but also what it does. University gallery exhibitions serve as critical vehicles for generating knowledge about design and its modes of practice.

In this setting, curatorial practice is not unlike publishing practice – it involves not merely arranging objects (see also: texts) but also assembling ideas. Curating an exhibition of graphic design alongside the designer is akin to publishing an artist book with an artist. The curatorial intercession becomes analogous to editorial intervention: making connections explicit for an audience, making public the intangible elements of laid-bare design. As James Langdon observes, ‘Graphic design is not good at self-representation. It often fails to show itself as a discourse.’7 In response, curating design, particularly in a university, becomes a means of constructing that discourse, of making graphic design legible as a form of inquiry and critique.

This pedagogical dimension is particularly significant in the context of design education. Exhibitions within the university setting can model expanded approaches to practice and offer new points of entry for students, not only as future designers but also as critical thinkers. Through encountering graphic design in the gallery – as process, research or proposition – students are invited to see design not simply as outcome-driven, but as a means of engaging with complexity across media, contexts and disciplines. This aligns with Tony Fry’s notion of redirective practice, in which design becomes a transformative process oriented towards critical, ethical and future-shaping questions.8 In this light, exhibitions are not just spaces for presentation, but active learning environments where students can reflect on design’s potential.

Curating, as a practice, is never neutral. As Prem Krishnamurthy observes, ‘Curating is not only about today’s choices; it creates historical and economic value for tomorrow.’9 In a Western context, design has held a place in terms of public display since at least the seventeenth century, when it featured in Western European cabinets of curiosities and, later, in international exhibitions like London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. However, graphic design has often been underrepresented in institutional collections and exhibitions, occupying a marginal position within what is considered ‘collectable’ or ‘exhibitable’ design. Until the emergence of dedicated museums and galleries for design – such as the Design Museum, London and the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, both established in 1989, as well as newer institutions like the Hong Kong Design Centre and 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Tokyo, which opened in 2002 and 2007, respectively – this absence shaped the discipline’s visibility. It limited not only the development of curatorial precedents but also audience familiarity with how graphic design might be encountered in a gallery setting. 

Even when included in such spaces, graphic design has frequently been reduced to contextual ephemera – exhibition programming often presents the discipline as printed matter alongside furniture or industrial design. Solo museum exhibitions of the work of graphic designers have been limited, and notable examples are almost exclusively by male practitioners: for example, the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s 1937 presentation of Lester Beall’s work; Paul Rand’s 1999 retrospective at Cooper Union, New York; and Stefan Sagmeister’s 2001 exhibition at Design Museum, London. April Greiman’s 1986 Walker Art Center presentation is often the only notable example of an exhibition by a high-profile woman graphic desiger. As such, graphic design has instead looked to more marginal spaces – art book fairs, Type Directors Clubs, academic and independent galleries – to present individual and critically potent practice.

Nevertheless, as Rick Poynor cautions, ‘Design exhibitions tend to strip the work of its original urgency and embed it in an institutional framework that flattens difference.’10 The challenge, then, is to resist this flattening – to use curating not simply to preserve or historicise, but to generate new ways of seeing, to situate graphic design as an active, circulating and critically engaged field. To curate expanded graphic design in a university design gallery is to resist reducing design to its formal outcomes and to instead invite participation, reflection and critical engagement. Unlike contemporary art, which is often framed as autonomous and authored, graphic design is embedded within language, its context and networks of production – systems that both constrain and generate possibility. Yet both art and design remain fertile grounds for proposition and experimentation. In this sense, the university gallery offers a unique site where design can be approached not merely as a service discipline, but as an expanded, situated practice with its own critical methods. In Catherine Griffiths: Out of Line, curating becomes more than an act of selection – it operates as a form of publishing, of pedagogy, of reframing. It makes space for interrogating the forces that shape design, while also imagining alternative ways in which it might be practised, valued and understood.

Megan Patty, curator, May 2025

1 Deyan Sudjic, ‘Foreword’, in Fleur Watson (ed.), The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and Design, Routledge, London, 2021, pp. 7–12.

2 Maria Lind, ‘The curatorial’, in Paul O’Neill (ed.), Curating Subjects, Open Editions, London, 2007, pp. 121–30.

3 Richard Hollis, Graphic Design: A Concise History, Thames & Hudson, London, 2002, p. 10.

4 James Goggin, ‘Practice from everyday life’, in Andrew Blauvelt & Ellen Lupton (eds), Graphic Design: Now in Production, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2011, p. 55.

5 Sara De Bondt, ‘Curating as graphic design research’, Journal for Artistic Research, vol. 28, 2022, <https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/974865/1511874>.

6 See Zak Kyes & Mark Owens (eds), Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design, Architectural Association, London, 2007; Alice Twemlow, ‘Some questions about an inquiry’, Design Observer, <https://designobserver.com/some-questions-about-an-inquiry/>, 21 Feb. 2008.

7 James Langdon, A School for Design Fiction, Spector Books, Leipzig, 2014, p. 64.

8 See Tony Fry, Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice, Berg Publishers, Oxford, 2009.

9 Prem Krishnamurthy, ‘Selling socialism: Klaus Wittkugel’s exhibition design in the 1950s’, The Exhibitionist, vol. 10, 2014, p. 11.

10 Rick Poynor (ed.), Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties, Laurence King Publishing, London, 2004, p. 11.