A partir da análise dos trabalhos do departamento de design da Cranbrook Academy of Art, durante o período coordenado por Katherine McCoy (1971 a 1995), este trabalho procura identificar os novos caminhos desenvolvidos pela escola para a prática do design gráfico contemporâneo, e em especial a concepção do design como parte do processo de comunicação. O design até os anos 1970 era regido por pressupostos formais, funcionais e neutros, o que talvez não permitisse entendê-lo como linguagem visual, em si, mas como mero suporte para o texto. Na escola, a abordagem funcionalista foi questionada nos anos 1970 e, a partir daí, nos anos 1980, inspirados por conceitos teóricos do pós-estruturalismo e pós-modernismo, foram introduzidas novas ideias a fim de legitimar o designer também como produtor de conteúdo. Ao buscar referências teóricas no pós-estruturalismo, percebeu-se a importância do receptor na interpretação da mensagem, assim como a necessidade de se produzir peças gráficas que encorajassem, a partir da relação do conteúdo com a forma gráfica, a participação do público. A escola, de modestas proporções, cuja média era a de 8 alunos ingressantes por ano, era baseada no ensino em estúdio, não possuía grade curricular fixa, nem disciplinas regulares. Os discentes eram sempre encorajados a pesquisar e se desenvolver. Muitas das pesquisas e resultados dos trabalhos são frutos da reflexão individual de cada aluno, inspirados pelo ambiente em contínuo desenvolvimento. A Cranbrook foi, dessa maneira, formadora de muitos dos principais designers norteamericanos atuais, como por exemplo Allen Hori, Andrew Bleauvelt, David Frej, David Shields, Ed Fella, Elliot Earls, Geoff Kaplan, Jane Kosstrin, Jeff Keedy, Kimberly Elam, Laurie Haycock Makela, Loraine Wild, Lucille Tenazas, Martin Venezky, Meredith Davis, Michael Carrabeta, Nancy Skolos, Richard Kerr, Robert Nakata, Scott Makela (1960-1999), Scott Santoro, Scott Zukowsky, entre outros. Cada um deles possuiu um papel particular e muitos compartilhavam idéias semelhantes, mas a maior parte deles procurou ampliar o campo do design gráfico agregando conteúdos mistos e abrindo-se a novas possibilidades de produção e reflexão sobre a relação entre texto e imagem. / With the analysis of the works from Cranbrook Academy of Art´s Design Department, under Katherine McCoy\'s Co-Chairmanship (1971 to 1995), this work intends identify the new ways developed by the School for the practice of contemporary graphic design, focusing on the concept of the design as part of communication process. Until the years 1970 design was ruled from the formal, functional and neutral presuppositions of Modernity, without the understanding of design as a visual language itself, but only as a mere support the text. In the 1970\'s the School questioned the functionalist approach, and during the 1980\'s years, new ideas were introduced to legitimate the designer as producer of contents, inspired by post-structuralism and post-modern concepts. Theoretical references in post structuralism stressed the importance of the receptor\'s interpretation of the message, as well in the importance of producing graphic works that encourage the participation from the public audience, founded in the relationship between content and graphic form. The School\'s graphic design program was modest in size 8 new students per year - and was studio-based without a fixed curriculum of courses and classes. The students were challenged to research and develop their individual expressions. Their research and resulting works are the fruit of the students\' individual reflection inspired by the continuously developing environment. Cranbrook produced many of the most important contemporary North American designers, such as Allen Hori, Andrew Bleauvelt, David Frej, David Shields, Ed Fella, Elliot Earls, Geoff Kaplan, Jane Kosstrin, Jeff Keedy, Kimberly Elam, Laurie Haycock Makela, Lorraine Wild, Lucille Tenazas, Martin Venezky, Meredith Davis, Michael Carrabeta, Nancy Skolos, Richard Kerr, Robert Nakata, Scott Makela (1960-1999), Scott Santoro, Scott Zukowsky, and others. Each one had a particular role play and many shared similar ideas, as they worked to enlarge the graphic design field with mixed contents and explored new possibilities of production and new roles for text and image.

In order to develop a program whereby people can be educated to appreciate and choose the best contemporary designs among the many textiles that are available, it is necessary to know which types of textiles, if any, among those designed in the modern manner, the public accepts, which it rejects, and the factors that influence selection. This study was made to discover those factors -- such as color, subject matter, and utility -- that determine popular choices in a representative group of well-designed modern printed textiles which were available on the Dallas market. The textiles were placed on public exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.

Between 1960 and 1992, American artist George Tsutakawa (1910 – 1997) created more than sixty fountain sculptures for publicly accessible sites in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. The vast majority were made by shaping sheet bronze into geometric and organically inspired abstract forms, often arranged around a vertical axis. Though postwar modernist artistic production and the issues it raises have been widely interrogated since the 1970s, and public art has been a major area of study since about 1980, Tsutakawa's fountains present a major intervention in North America's urban fabric that is not well-documented and remains almost completely untheorized. In addition to playing a key role in Seattle's development as an internationally recognized leader in public art, my dissertation argues that these works provide early evidence of a linked concern with nature and spirituality that has come to be understood as characteristic of the Pacific Northwest. Tsutakawa was born in Seattle, but raised and educated primarily in Japan prior to training as an artist at the University of Washington, then teaching in UW's Schools of Art and Architecture. His complicated personal history, which in World War II included being drafted into the U.S. army, while family members were interned and their property confiscated, led art historian Gervais Reed to declare that Tsutakawa was aligned with neither Japan nor America – that he and his art existed somewhere in-between. There is much truth in Reed's statement; however, artistically, such dualistic assessments deny the rich interplay of cultural allusions in Tsutakawa's fountains. Major inspirations included the Cubist sculpture of Alexander Archipenko, Himalayan stone cairns, Japanese heraldic emblems, First Nations carvings, and Bauhaus theory. Focusing on the early commissions, completed during the 1960s, my study examines the artist's debts to intercultural networks of artistic exchange – between North America, Asia, and Europe – operative in the early and mid-twentieth century, and in some cases before. I argue that, with his fountain sculptures, this Japanese American artist sought to integrate and balance such binaries as nature/culture, intuition/reason, and spiritual/material, which have long served to support the construction of East and West as opposed conceptual categories. / Graduate