This is part of a project I did last semester for Typography 2. We were to design a publication based on a chosen interview we transcribed, and mine was with Benny Andrews. He was an amazing African American artist who recently died in 2006, whose paintings were always collaged with different materials and depicted aspects of his life in America as a black man from the South. His art had what I’d call an “ugly” art aspect to it, most definitely a flawed human design aspect to it, because of how he collaged the feeling of two parts of his life. He grew up as a sharecropper in rural Georgia in the 30’s, and then went on to attend the School of Art Institute in Chicago. He explained that the crude, ugly, roughness of his upbringing and the clean, refined experience of his schooling are brought together in his collage paintings. Even the faces of some of the characters he presents are misshapen and conventionally a bit “ugly”, but it’s their uniqueness, their humanness, and the dynamic of the pieces that draw you in. They aren’t conventional, and that’s what makes them, to me, beautiful. That is part of the reason why I feel so strongly about “ugly” art, about flawed human design; I feel it can, in many ways, have so much more depth because of how it is presented. It is used as a vehicle to deliver a certain message. I tried to mimic this in my design of the book; collaging parts of his artwork seemed risky given some artists don’t like their work to be tampered with, but I really wanted to emphasize what he was doing with my own design. I wanted to put myself in his position and design how I think maybe he’d like to if he ever got the chance to design a book. What was his work but a total reflection of his human experience? How could a machine replicate years of life experiences, culminated into beautiful works of art?