McRay Magleby

McRay Magleby is known for his graphic design work, including his 1985 Wave of Peace poster, which was voted the most memorable poster in the world. He also designed the 2002 Winter Olympics logo.

McRay Magleby (born 1945) is an American graphic designer and artist known for his screen prints and posters. He studied at the University of Utah, later teaching graphic design there for over thirty years. Magleby's work often incorporates bold colours and simple, geometric forms. His style is influenced by mid-century modernism and Swiss design. He frequently uses humour and irony in his images, creating works that are both visually appealing and conceptually engaging. His posters frequently promote cultural events, institutions, and locations. Examples include posters for the Utah Shakespeare Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and various national parks. Magleby also designed the official poster for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Magleby's prints are included in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and other institutions. His work has been recognised by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He continues to work as a designer and artist, creating new prints and posters that reflect his distinctive style.

McRay Magleby is associated with Pop Art, a movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in England and then in the USA during the 1960s. Pop Art challenged traditional fine-art conventions. It embraced consumerism and material culture, often drawing inspiration from advertising, comic strips, and mass media. The critic Lawrence Alloway coined the term 'Pop Art' in 1958. Pop artists often employed techniques of mass production, such as screen printing, to create their works. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist are other important figures connected with Pop Art. These artists used bold colours and simplified imagery, frequently repeating motifs to reflect mass production and consumerism. Pop Art aimed to blur the lines between 'high art' and 'low art', celebrating everyday objects and popular icons.

McRay Magleby is associated with Pop art, a movement that emerged in England in the mid-1950s. It gained prominence in New York during the 1960s, sharing attention with Minimalism. Pop art signified a shift, where the ordinary and mass-produced held as much importance as the unique, blurring the lines between 'high art' and 'low art'. The media and advertising became favourite subjects for Pop Art's often witty observations of consumer society. Pop artists often drew inspiration from commercial sources. Andy Warhol, for instance, incorporated commercial photographs into his work. Roy Lichtenstein re-created comic book images on a large scale, extracting them to their core elements. Pop art brought art closer to everyday life and mass culture, reflecting the visual culture found in television, magazines, and comics.

Many major museums hold works of art deco that might include pieces by McRay Magleby. In the United States, these include the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond), the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art (Winter Park, Florida), and the Wolfsonian at Florida International University (Miami Beach). Other US museums with relevant collections are the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum (Atlanta), the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In the United Kingdom, you can find art deco at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the National Museums of Scotland (Edinburgh), the Manchester Art Gallery, the Geffrye Museum (London), the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, and the Bakelite Museum (Williton). Other museums with similar holdings are the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris), the Deutsches Historisches Museum (Berlin), the National Museum of Ireland (Dublin), and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam).

McRay Magleby was born in 1953 in Chicago, Illinois. He was raised in a family that ran a commercial art school. For high school, he went to Marmion Military Academy in Aurora, Illinois. He then studied at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, with Roland Brener, and he briefly lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. Magleby returned to Chicago before studying at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. In 1979, he completed an M.F.A. at the Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1981, he began teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. He currently lives in Los Angeles. Magleby is known for his oversized, mannequin-like figure sculptures.

McRay Magleby's work has connections to a range of artists and movements. The Art Students League, founded in 1875, provided instruction to many famous artists, including Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Norman Rockwell. The Salmagundi Club, which acquired a permanent home in New York City in 1917, also counted many significant artists among its members, such as Harvey Dunn, Howard Pyle, and N.C. Wyeth. The Painters of the West, an association of artists started in 1923, included artists like Victor Clyde Forsythe and Frank Tenney Johnson. Within California, the Los Angeles Modern Art Society included artists who were not nature's imitators. Modern painters of the era, California Impressionists, and Progressives were not mutually exclusive. For instance, Karl Yens often worked in an Impressionist manner and was a member of the Modern Art Society.

McRay Magleby's artistic influences are not well documented. One source indicates that Analytic Cubism, particularly the work of Braque and Picasso, was formative during his college years. He also studied Kandinsky and Miró, with additional interest in Matisse and Mondrian. Magleby analysed the structure of their paintings, citing Matisse's *Blue Window*, Miró's *Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird*, Cézanne's *Card Players*, and Mondrian's grid paintings as examples. He also noted the impact of Léger, Renaissance and Quattrocento artists, Old Masters, American masters, and African art. Another source mentions that university-educated photographers were influenced by their instructors and peers, and that their images were both an expression of individual style and a reaction to previous modes of working.

McRay Magleby was a graphic designer at Brigham Young University for twenty-six years. He was named designer of the decade by CASE in 1986.

McRay Magleby (born 1945) is an American graphic designer and artist. He is best known for his poster designs, which often feature bold colours and simple, symbolic imagery. Magleby's work is important because it demonstrates the power of graphic design as a tool for communication. His posters frequently address social and political issues. They are direct, accessible, and memorable, communicating complex ideas in an immediate way. His poster for the 1990 Utah Arts Festival, for instance, uses a silhouetted figure and geometric shapes to evoke a sense of movement and energy. Similarly, his "Utah, America's Salad Bar" poster (1983) uses humour to promote the state's agricultural industry. Magleby's designs are also notable for their effective use of typography. He frequently incorporates text as an integral part of the overall composition, using different fonts and sizes to create visual interest and emphasise key messages. His work has been exhibited widely and is included in the collections of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. It continues to be relevant in a world saturated with visual information.