Johanna Drucker
Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita, Department of Information Studies, UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Recent work includes Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022) and Affluvia: The toxic off-gassing of affluent culture (The Bridge, 2025). Her artist’s books are represented in museum and library special collections throughout North America and elsewhere and were the subject of a travelling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, in 2012–14. She lives in Los Angeles.
Among Friends: 1958–63, the exhibition of Mimi Gross's paintings and drawings from the early 1960s at Eric Firestone Gallery, is not only a sheer visual pleasure, it also adds to our understanding of American modern art.
This is a double portrait in counterpoint tongues, musings, mutterings, riffs, and rants, reflections and peregrinations through lexical domains.
Every era creates a utopia in its own image. In ours, the summer’s film offerings exhibit enough dystopian worlds to make the point. Batman, Land of the Dead, Star Wars: in popular culture our empire has become evil, dominant, corrupt, controlled by an exclusive corporate class that gouges the poor and squanders the natural and cultural resources.
