Collab Gallery, first floor, Perelman Building
Main Building
Unpack Bruce Mau's visionary design principles, which champion innovative solutions to global challenges.
Bruce Mau is internationally recognized for his achievements in design, including visual identities, brand systems, books, packaging, and exhibition graphics. His most recent work applies design tools and concepts to environmental, social, economic, and political problems. This exhibition offers examples of Mau's innovative solutions for clients like Coca-Cola, the country of Guatemala, and Biomuseo in Panama City, presenting a portrait of a tireless designer at the vanguard of the field's search for solutions to global concerns.
Mau's current design consultancy, Massive Change Network, is based on twenty-four principles that individuals or a global brand can use to set goals and achieve solutions. The exhibition highlights nine of these concepts, beginning with the eponymous "Work on What You Love," and a display of more than two hundred books that Mau has designed for artists, architects, and clients such as Gagosian Gallery and the Getty Research Institute. Throughout the exhibition, graphics, books, objects, videos, and interactive digital displays highlight the story of each project and its guiding design principle.
Visitors to the exhibition have the opportunity to consider Massive Change Network's design concepts in relation to their own lives and communities at a work station in the gallery. Additionally, Bruce Mau's principles will be applied to design-thinking workshops in partnership with cultural organizations around Philadelphia. Focusing on issues specific to our city, the workshops will demonstrate the potential of design to combine aesthetic with ethical and social considerations, and, in the process, bolster the efforts of Philadelphians to foster positive change.
