Designing America’s Face in the Cultural Cold War
Lecture with Beverly Payeff-Masey
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) presents "Designing America's Face in the Cultural Cold War," a lecture with Beverly Payeff-Masey.
Beverly Payeff-Masey is a design historian and educator with extensive US Foreign Service experience in Europe and Southeast Asia. She is the Director of the Masey Archive, a design-history resource for scholars, architectural historians, and filmmakers that she co-founded with her late husband Jack Masey. The Masey Archive grew out of Jack Masey’s private collection as Director of Design for the United States Information Agency during the height of the Cold War, and his work as an author of ‘Cold War Confrontations: US Exhibitions and Their Role In The Cultural Cold War’ (Lars Muller, 2008). The Masey Archive houses an extensive collection of images, textual documents, rare artifacts and ephemera that document the intersection of post-WWII American Modernism with the international political and cultural realities of the Cold War.
Presented in association with the exhibition A Designed Life: Contemporary American Textile, Wallpapers, and Containers & Packaging, 1951 – 1954, which will be open until 9pm on October 23.
Image: Crop of color screen-print (facsimile) of American Home Appliances exhibition poster, 1952 by Studio Müller-Blase, 33″ x 23.62”. Photo Credit: Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ds-07679.