Johanna Drucker (born May 30, 1952) is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language:
letterform
A letterform, letter-form or letter form is a term used especially in typography, palaeography, calligraphy and epigraphy to mean a letter (alphabet), letter's shape. A letterform is a type of glyph, which is a specific, concrete way of writing a ...
s,
typography
Typography is the art and technique of Typesetting, arranging type to make written language legibility, legible, readability, readable and beauty, appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, Point (typogra ...
,
visual poetry,
art, and lately,
digital art aesthetics. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the
Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at
UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...
.
In 2023, she was elected to the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...
.
Biography
Drucker was born in 1952 in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia ( ), colloquially referred to as Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania, most populous city in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and the List of United States cities by population, sixth-most populous city in the Unit ...
to a
Jewish
Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...
family, the daughter of Barbara (née Witmer) and Boris Drucker (1920–2009). Her father was a
cartoonist whose works were published in diverse publications as ''
The Saturday Evening Post'' and ''
The New Yorker''.
Drucker earned her B.F.A. degree from the
California College of Arts and Crafts in 1973 and her Ph.D. from the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
in 1986. As of 2023, she is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information Studies at
UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...
.
She was previously the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the
University of Virginia, and has been on the faculties of
Purchase College, SUNY,
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
,
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...
,
Harvard University
Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
and the
University of Texas, Dallas. She has also been the Digital Humanities Fellow at the
Stanford Humanities Center (2008-2009), the inaugural fellow for the
Beinecke Library (2018-2019), Digital Cultures Fellow at
UC Santa Barbara, and Mellon Faculty Fellow in Fine Arts at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...
. She was elected as a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.
Artistic activity
Drucker printed her first book in 1972 and has been active in the field for over five decades.
Her book art touches on a variety of themes, especially "the exploration of the conventions of narrative prose and the devices by which it orders, sequences, and manipulates events according to its own logic" as well as "the use of experimental typography to expand the possibilities of prose beyond the linear format of traditional presentation." Her papers are archived at Yale.
Her work is in permanent collections such as
Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen ...
and the
National Museum of Women in the Arts (permanent collection), has been exhibited at universities, libraries, galleries, and museums throughout the world, including
Scripps College (2010),
Visual Studies Workshop (2014),
the
University of Delaware (Keynote, 2017)
Getty Museum (2018),
Center for Book Arts (2021),
Belvedere Museum (2023),
and the
Granary Books’ Grolier Club (2025). Her work has been translated into Korean, Catalan, Chinese, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Danish and Portuguese.
A retrospective of Drucker's work, titled ''Druckworks: 40 Years of Books and Projects by Johanna Drucker'' has been exhibited throughout the United States.
Research
Drucker's research focuses on alphabet historiography, modeling interpretation for electronic scholarship, digital aesthetics, the history of visual information design, history of the book and print culture, history of information, and critical studies in visual knowledge representation. Her monograph, ''The Century of Artist's Book'' (1995), was the first monograph length publication on the topic of artist's books. Most recently, her scholarship has focused on information visualization, "which draws heavily on models from the empirical sciences, where approaches based on representation and transparency prevail." In contrast to this approach, Drucker stresses the rhetorical and performative nature of visualization, with emphasis on interpretation. She contends that digital tools should be used to "design graphic forms that inscribe subjectivity and affective judgment."
Books
1990s
In her first book, ''Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition'' (1994), Drucker maps
visual arts
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics (art), ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual a ...
discourses through a rigorous examination of the rhetoric of 19th and 20th century critical writing and art practice. In the process, she theorizes the modernist tradition of visual art through a rhetoric of representation rather than from a formalist or historical approach, particularly regarding
space
Space is a three-dimensional continuum containing positions and directions. In classical physics, physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions. Modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless ...
, the ontology of the object, and the production of
subjectivity. In ''The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art'' (1994), Drucker contends that much art criticism of
Futurism,
Dada, and
Cubism has failed to appreciate the fundamental materiality of these movements in relation to both visual and poetic forms of representation. Drucker emphasized, for the first time, the extent to which typographic activity furthered debates about the very nature and function of the
avant-garde. Continuing with her interest in letterform, Drucker's next book, ''The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination'' (1995) analyzes the history of the alphabet, not just as a collection of arbitrary signs, but as the direct visual embodiment of meaning in relation to intellectual movements. For example, she shows how modern typefaces, first developed in the late 18th century, embody Enlightenment philosophy. Shifting her focus to
artist books, ''Century of Artists' Books'' (1995) is the first full-length analysis of the development of artists' books as a 20th-century art form, exploring their structure, form, and conceptualization. Analyzing such artistic luminaries as
William Morris,
Marcel Duchamp, and
Max Ernst, Drucker considers the book as metaphor, poem, and narrative or non-narrative sequence by situating its historical, theoretical, sociological, and technical aspects within 20th century avant-garde art movements. ''Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics'' (1998) is a collection of selected critical essays by Drucker previously published in literary and scholarly journals. The book begins with a discussion of her work as a
book artist and an account of what led her to pursue her scholarly interests. She provides close readings of contemporary language artists and the use of language in cyberspace.
2000s
In collaboration with Brad Freeman, Drucker produced ''Nova Reperta'' (2000), inspired by illustrations by the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Johannes
Stradanus. Work on ''Nova Reperta'' was originally begun by Drucker and Freeman in 1993, who planned to include the work in the exhibition ''Science and the Artist's Book''
Science and the Artist's Book
'' organized by the
Smithsonian Institution Libraries. She collaborated again with Freeman on ''Emerging Sentience'' (2001), a work that reflects Drucker's interest in the literature of artificial intelligence and the development of digital media. Her work, ''The Century of Artist Books'' (2004) describes artist books in the 20th century. In ''Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity'' (2005), Drucker calls for a revamp of the academic critical vocabulary to something more befitting new forms and practices in
contemporary art
Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a ...
, especially as it engages with material culture. Considered at the cutting edge of art criticism, ''Sweet Dreams'' details the clear departure of artists from modernist avant-garde movements and shows the ways in which art criticism can shift its terms and sensibilities. ''Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide'' (2008) is an edited volume that traces the social and cultural role of visual communication from prehistory to the present, from logos to posters, from the political to the commercial, from early writing to digital design. The book details the ways in which designers have historically shaped graphic forms and effects. Taking up evolving issues of methodology in the burgeoning field of
digital humanities
Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or Information technology, digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanitie ...
, ''SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing'' (2009) emphasizes the visual over the written system, the generative over the descriptive, and aesthetic subjectivity over analytic objectivism by building on the collective intellectual ferment of digital humanities as it developed at the
University of Virginia, one of the universities where the field of digital humanities first developed.
2010s
In ''Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production'' (2014), Drucker fuses digital humanities, media studies, and graphic design history to provide a descriptive critical language for the analysis of graphical knowledge and outline the principles by which visual formats organize meaningful content, particularly the
graphical user interface
A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...
.
Throughout 2012-2014, her artist books were featured in a travelling retrospective: Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects.
A reviewer noted that "''Diagrammatic Writing'' (2014) is a poetic demonstration of the capacity of format to produce meaning."
2020s
* ''Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display'', MIT Press, 2020.
* ''Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist'' (about
Ilia Zdanevich), Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020.
* ''Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present'', University of Chicago Press, 2022, 380 pp.
Selected scholarly work
* ''Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition'', Columbia University Press, 1994. ()
* ''The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art'', The University of Chicago Press, 1994. ()
* ''The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination'', Thames and Hudson, 1995. ()
* ''The Century of Artists' Books'', Granary Books, 1995. ()
* ''Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing, and Visual Poetics'', Granary Books, 1998. ()
* ''Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity'', University Of Chicago Press, 2005. ()
* ''Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide'', with
Emily McVarish, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008 ()
* ''SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing'', University of Chicago Press, 2009. ()
* ''Digital_Humanities'', with Anne Burdick,
Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and
Jeffrey Schnapp, MIT Press, 2012. ()
* ''What Is?: Nine Epistemological Essays'', Cuneiform Press, 2013. ()
* ''Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production'', Harvard University Press, 2014. ()
* ''Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display'', MIT Press, 2020. ()
* ''Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist'', Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. ()
See also
*
Language poets
The Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (magazine), ''L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Berna ...
*
List of concrete and visual poets
Notes
External links
*
Johanna Drucker Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Faculty web pageon art meets technology:the history and effects of the alphabet
on
Joseph Nechvatal and Critical Pleasure''
* Johanna Drucker, 'Temporal Photography',
Philosophy of Photography volume 1, number 1, Intellect Publishers, Spring 2010, pp. 22–28.)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Drucker, Johanna
American book artists
Communication design
American art critics
American art historians
Living people
American art curators
American women curators
Cultural historians
Jewish American historians
American contemporary artists
UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies faculty
1952 births
American women book artists
American women artists
Jewish American artists
American women art historians
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
People in digital humanities
Historians from California
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American women
Electronic literature critics
Visual poets
Members of the American Philosophical Society