Victor Margolin

Victor Margolin (born 1941) is Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois, Chicago

Early Life & Career

Victor Margolin grew up in Washington D.C. He studied English literature and film at Columbia University, where he graduated in 1963. While a student, he contributed to MAD magazine and edited the university humor magazine, the Columbia Jester, as well as two books of puns.^[1] After graduation, he studied film directing on a Fulbright Fellowship at the Institute of Higher Cinema Studies in Paris. Following his return to the United States, he worked briefly for the National Broadcasting Company in Washington D.C. and for the public television station, WETA. He moved to New York in 1972, where he published his first two books on design history and design theory, American Poster Renaissance: The Great Age of Poster Design, 1890-1900 (1975) and the edited volume, Propaganda: The Art of Persuasion, WWII (1976).

In 1975, he moved to Chicago where he held several jobs in college and university administration before obtaining a PhD in design history from the Union Graduate School, a non-traditional institution based in Cincinnati.^[1] His dissertation was on the graphic design of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and László Moholy-Nagy. Margolin began teaching art and design history at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1982 and remained there for his entire career, retiring in 2006.

When he arrived at the university, he was invited to join a group of colleagues to help found the academic design journal Design Issues, which began publication in 1984 and celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2014. Margolin was the founding editor and then became a member of the editorial board. He edited Design Discourse, an anthology of articles from the journal in 1989.^[2] Other edited or co-edited volumes include The Idea of Design (1995), Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies (1995), and The Designed World: Images, Objects, Environments (2010). In 1997 he published The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946 and in 1992 a volume of his own articles, The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies appeared. He began work on a comprehensive World History of Design sometime after 2000, the first two volumes of which were published in 2015.^[3]

For more than fifteen years, Margolin was the director of the Museum of Corn-temporary Art, a private museum that he founded and maintained in his university office.^[1] In 2002 he published a book on the museum, Culture is Everywhere, with the photographer Patty Carroll.^[4] The museum now resides in the permanent collection of The Wolfsonian in Miami Beach, Florida.

Margolin has been a visiting professor and lecturer at numerous colleges and universities throughout the world. He continues to publish scholarly articles and personal essays and to write doggerel verse, which is yet to see the light of day. He is also an avid photographer and looks forward to publishing one or more collections of his photographs.

Margolin was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the LearnXDesign conference in Chicago in 2015, on behalf of the conference organizers, for his 'exemplary contributions to design history, research, education and practice'. ^[5]

Publications & Contributions

The Little Pun Book, editor. Mt. Vernon, N.Y. Peter Pauper Press, 1960
Peter Pauper’s Pun Book, editor, Mt. Vernon, N.Y. Peter Pauper Press, 1962
American Poster Renaissance: The Great Age of Poster Design, 1890-1910, author, New York: Watson-Guptill, 1975
Propaganda; The Art of Persuasion, WWII, editor. New York and London: Chelsea House Publishers, 1976
The Promise and the Product: 200 Years of American Advertising Posters, co-author, New York: Macmillan, 1979
Design Discourse, editor, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1989
The Idea of Design, co-editor, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1995
Discovering Design, co-editor, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1995
The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946, author, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1997
The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies, author, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2002
Culture is Everywhere, Munich. Prestel, 2002
Healing the World; A Challenge to Designers, Chicago: Archeworks, 2004 [The Archeworks Papers 1 No. 1]
The Designed World: Images, Objects, Environments, co-editor, Oxford: Berg, 2010
Design e Risco de Mudanca (Design and the Risk of Change). Porto: Verso da História and ESAD, 2014
World History of Design, v. 1 & v. 2, London; Bloomsbury, 2015
The Design of Utopia, co-author, Chicago: University of Illinois, 1985

References

1 2 3 "Victor Margolin". University of Illinois at Chicago. Retrieved 3 November 2014.
↑ "Design Discourse". The University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press. Retrieved 3 November 2014.
↑ "World History of Design". Bloomsbury Publishing. Bloomsbury Publishing. Retrieved 3 November 2014.
↑ "Amazon". Amazon. Retrieved 3 November 2014.
↑ [http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/victor-margolin/> "Victor Margolin"]. Bloomsbury Publishing. Bloomsbury Publishing. Retrieved 27 February 2015.

Bloomsbury Publishing. "Victor Margolin". [online]. Available at: <http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/victor-margolin/>

Bloomsbury Publishing. World History of Design. [online]. Available at: <http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/world-history-of-design-9781472569288/>

Bloomsbury Publishing. The Designed World. [online]. Available at: <http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-designed-world-9781847885852/>

University of Illinois at Chicago. Victor Margolin. [online]. Available at: <http://tigger.uic.edu/~victor/>

Carnegie Mellon University. How do you Design the Future? [online]. Available at: <http://www.design.cmu.edu/designthefuture/victor-margolin/>

MIT Press Journals. Design Issues. [online]. Available at: <http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/desi.2009.25.2.94#.VA2EpaK5F8E>

Tropisms. A thoughtful Explorer: Interview with Victor Margolin. [online]. Available at: <http://www.tropecollaborative.com/blog/2011/10/a-thoughtful-explorer-interview-with-victor-margolin/>

University of Illinois at Chicago. Faculty Papers -- Victor Margolin Papers. [online]. Available at: <http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/specialcoll/services/lhsc/ead/006-04-20-01f.html>

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