Richard Diebenkorn in his Ocean Park studio, Santa Monica, Calif., 1977, photograph by Larry Berger © The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation
Photograph of Richard Diebenkorn by Jerry Fredrick, 1981 © The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation
Richard Diebenkorn Foundation
In collaboration with MacFadden & Thorpe
Scope
Brand
Editorial
Reputation
Digital
Social
Special Events
Video
Website including UI / UX
Writing
Partners
Client: Andrea Liguori, Katharine James
Reputation: Brent Foster Jones
Brand: MacFadden & Thorpe
Web Development: Kanopi
Printer: Oscar Printing
Cinematography: Matthew Pendergast
Photography: Whitney Legge
Since 2016 we have enjoyed an ongoing, close partnership with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, helping to verbally and visually define the organization, which works to increase public access to Diebenkorn’s work and legacy. We provide fully integrated marketing communications advice, guidance, creative, and content across public relations, digital, and social disciplines. And on a rolling basis, the office assists venues and institutions exhibiting work by the artist with media relations, writing and editing, and inclusion across the Foundation's platforms and channels , as we did during the traveling Matisse/Diebenkorn (2017) and again most recently during a tour (2017-2019) of early work.
In 2016 we debuted a brand and visual identity system for the Foundation, as well as; an all-new website diebenkorn.org, a scholarly public relations program, and a new verbal identity, including tone, voice, and writing. This initial work with the Foundation was in support of Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalogue Raisonné (Yale University Press, 2016), a four-volume, 2,000 page definitive collection, containing more than 5,000 of the artist’s unique works, including sketches; drawings; paintings on paper, board, canvas; and sculptural objects and integrated media relations, invitation only special events on both coasts with curators, scholars, and collectors, advertising, and graphics.
In 2017, to support ongoing awareness around the volumes, we scripted, directed, and produced a film by Bay Area filmmaker Matthew Pendergast that featured Richard Diebenkorn authorities Jane Livingston, Andrea Liguori, Acting Executive Director of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, and editor of the artist’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné of prints (Yale University Press, 2024).
The office was also invited at this time by the leadership of the Foundation to assist with a strategic planning process. This included a research phase of the artist endowed foundation field and execution of a strategic planning curriculum with the board and staff. A final plan document was drafted and approved and continues to be implemented across the Foundation, with an emphasis on education.
In 2021, led by Katharine James, the Foundation’s Head of Digital and Public Engagement, MacFadden & Thorpe developed an encyclopedic diebenkorn.org, featuring approximately 3,400 unique works and a sampling of the newly photographed artist’s prints, advanced search functionality, new and original scholarly content, and videos. Users can now conduct refined searches of artworks within periods and mediums, a “sticky” search function travels with users on the site and is always visible, and all artworks are exhaustively documented. The expanded platform includes an emphasis on visual material, from artworks to archival materials of over 8,000 items, and includes a prominent zoom feature across the website with a window-box pop out and sharp, newly digitized, high resolution archival imagery. The expanded diebenkorn.org also features fresh scholarly content, the Foundation’s quarterly From the Basement, to invite a closer look at moments in history that impacted Richard Diebenkorn’s development as an artist and spotlight rarely seen correspondence and photographs alongside art he was producing at the time. In addition, a dedicated newsroom/content feed highlightsa slate of ongoing and exclusive interviews, features, and announcements reported in a consistent institutional voice, style, and syntax we have developed over time for the Foundation and applied across platforms.
To discuss new insights into the artist’s “private practice and the studio outside” on the occasion of the retrospective Richard Diebenkorn: Works on Paper 1946–1992 at Van Doren Waxter in New York during #Diebenkorn100, the artist’s daughter Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant, and Daisy Murray Holman, former Head of Archives at the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, had an intimate conversation in the artist’s former studio in Healdsburg that we helped to produce and promote. The conversation took place in front of a window depicted by the artist in a 1988 charcoal drawing. Out the window the view across the vineyard is visible as is Mount Saint Helena, which Diebenkorn called “my Mont Saint-Victoire'' or “la Montagne de Cezanne” after the famous peak Cézanne painted in Aix-en-Provence, France. Remarking on the rarely seen photographs embedded in the new essay, especially the artist’s travel photographs—a 1978 photograph taken in France, a 1979 snapshot from a trip to Venezuela—Diebenkorn Grant confessed she “never saw” many of these “private photographs, somehow…they were not shared.” “But,” she added, “they are so him. They are so the way he sees.”
In 2022, and again in a close collaboration with the Head of Digital and Public Engagement Katharine James at the Foundation, we provided a combination of advice, guidance, outreach, and creative to help conceptualize and execute #Diebenkorn100, a year-long series of national museum installations and digital events on diebenkorn.org and @DiebenkornFoundation, celebrating the artist's centennial. We were invited to make a variety of online/offline recommendations and encouraged the Foundation to develop new scholarship, resulting in the essay, “Private Practice and the Studio Outside: Richard Diebenkorn Capturing the World for Himself, A Painter Taking Pictures,” by Holman, which explored the archival holdings and sparked a response by a prominent curator who reflected on the discovery and related pictures and paintings.
A highlight of #Diebenkorn100, we partnered with the Foundation to execute a scholarly, visually striking program on @DiebenkornFoundation, the Foundation’s popular Instagram channel, featuring new and original commissioned writing by diverse contemporary critics with full access to the artist’s archives. Posted on diebenkorn.org, the series debuted with a lyrical, elliptical essay by Charity Coleman, a prose-poet, essayist, and art writer who has written for Artforum and BOMB and who was selected by our office. Coleman unearthed the artist’s 1988 CBS Sunday Morning News interview to consider how Diebenkorn sometimes struggled to talk about his work in interviews and correspondence. The series continued with an essay by artist, arts writer, and musician Amadour— a contributor to Frieze—who explored Diebenkorn’s relationship to place, and concluded with art critic Harley Wong, a contributor to Artforum and Art in America, who looked at how his years as a painting instructor, influencing students from the Photorealist Robert Bechtle, to the abstractionist Bernice Bing.