Stephen Frykholm’s Picnic Posters

Cranbrook Art Museum. n.d. Essence of Summer: Stephen Frykholm's Picnic Posters for Herman Miller | Cranbrook Art Museum. [online] Available at: <https://cranbrookartmuseum.org/exhibition/essence-of-summer-stephen-frykholms-picnic-posters-for-herman-miller/>

Among Frykholm's first assignments at Herman Miller was a poster for the company's annual summer picnic. For this quick assignment Frykholm turned to screen printing, a simple process that he learned while working for the Peace Corps in Aba, Nigeria, at a government trade school. All fifty copies of Frykholm's 1970 poster were screen-printed in a basement over the course of one night. Its theme of sweet corn was illustrated with co-worker Phil Mitchell's assistance. Frykholm placed an ear of corn in his mouth, and Mitchell sketched. Frykholm loved the immediacy of screen printing, creating stencils, layering colors, and adding a glossy varnish to each print for a vibrant effect. A great success, the jubilant posters became an annual project for the next twenty years.

Frykholm's bold use of bright colors, dynamic compositions, and simplified forms harken back to the modern designs of the twentieth-century European object poster, but rendered in a timely Pop art idiom. The poster series translates a variety of popular potluck foods, magnifying and distilling each into its essential form. For the 1982 poster of a seven-layer salad, Frykholm diced its various ingredients and arranged them on a photocopier to better understand their shapes. For the 1983 edition, he scattered the letters of the poster's title among an ice cream cone's sprinkles. Frykholm's playful approach is displayed again in his 1988 design, in which lollypop sticks contain the lyrics to Ben Kweller's song Lollipop. Like the picnic itself, Stephen Frykholm's posters are the essence of summer fun.

Stephen's work used limited colours but showed vivid scenes. He used generalized-shaped patterns in the posters, but people can easily recognize them using juxtaposed shapes. The bold colours and layout show a kind of humour and show pop art style to some extent. Because I will make screen printing too, Stephen's work shows me the visual example of what illustration posters screen printing can make. I especially like the sweet corn poster. I want to make a small brochure about my dental floss typeface, so I want to combine the elements of mouth and teeth in it.

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