There’s enough do-gooding art to suffocate a saint at this year’s
Bumbershoot: a roving cart encouraging plant adoption by Vaughn Bell, a
survey in photographs and words of activists in 43 countries by
Katharina Mouratidi, a house made of recycled bottles by Jasmine
Zimmerman, a feast devoted to the revolutionary spirit of 1968 by One
Pot, a look at how individuals affect the world—including the
chance to talk directly with people in Tehran, right there in the
gallery—curated by Marita Holdaway.
But only one man, Daniel Smith, traveled to an epicenter of American
fear and ignorance in order to create his exhibition. He went to the
Iranian capital, Tehran, as a follow-up to the show he cocurated at
last year’s Bumbershoot, which paired silk-screened posters by graphic
designers from Seattle and Havana. His exhibitions are more than poster
shows; they’re trips to place where Americans do not—or
cannot—go.
“I was looking for another place that wasn’t easily accessible for
Americans,” he said in a phone interview. “As far as we can tell, this
is the first exhibit of contemporary Iranian graphic design in the
United States since the revolution.”
Smith got his visa to Tehran, which he visited last December,
through a peace group based in New York. When his in-country movements
were restricted at the last minute, prohibiting him from keeping his
scheduled studio appointments, graphic designers came to his hotel to
meet him.
The final pairings are not necessarily flattering to the Seattle
designers, of which Smith is one. “In a lot of cases, the Iranian work
just blows the Seattle work away,” he said. The Iranian designs are
based in—and playing with, sometimes precariously—the long
tradition of Persian calligraphy. By contrast, the American imagery is
nonchalant, profane, modernistic. Each city’s design renders the
other’s newly unfamiliar. In the gold-and-black logo for the show, the
two sides are united. It’s not just a disco-fied mirror image, it’s a
full-throated dual-language announcement, full of tensions that reach
far beyond design. 
