Taking the world by storm
Tue 22 March, 2016![Article Header Image](/media/109424/noel-douglas-main.jpg?format=auto&quality=30&rnd=131917894153000000)
It’s been a busy year for University of Bedfordshire Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design, Noel Douglas who is currently exhibiting internationally in two shows, with a third one only recently closing.
It’s The Political Economy, Stupid has been touring the world for the past five years, and is currently on display at the Dorothy W. and C. Lawson Reed, Jr. Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio in the United States until 10 April.
The exhibition explores the relationship and impact that art and artists have and how they can productively engage with the problems that stem from capital, crisis, and resistance. The title is based on James Carville’s catch phrase “It’s the economy, stupid,” which later was associated closely with Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential Campaign.
As well as exhibiting, Douglas also designed the cover of the book that accompanies the show.
After its initial showing in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and travelling from Dundee, Barnsley, Dublin, Nottingham, Douglas’ work is currently on display as part of A World to Win in Wolverhampton Art Galley until 10 April.
The exhibition showcases ‘posters of protest and revolution’ spanning a century seeking political change. From Suffragettes to Syria posters have been a powerful means to ‘mobilise, educate and organise’.
Also Programme Lead for Graphic Design at the University, Douglas explains: “I am artist and designer who works across a range of media. My main interests are in the aesthetics and politics and creative use of graphics and art in social movements.”
Douglas was also part of a collective display Disobedient Objects that showed last year at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and has gone on a global tour most recently at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney Australia.
A collection of art from the Victoria and Albert Museum and spanning some 30 years, the exhibition ‘demonstrates how political activism drives a wealth of design ingenuity and collective creativity that defies standard definitions of art and design’.
Culturally relevant objects such as instructions on ‘how to protest intelligently’ from the unrest in Tahrir Square in Cairo, defaced currency from the Occupy movement and make-shift gas masks from the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul are included in the exhibition.
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