San Francisco Center for the Book Awarded NEA Grant for David Anthony King Exhibition
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has made an award of $25,000 to San Francisco Center for the Book for its forthcoming exhibition David Anthony King: Book Projects and Zines, 1977 - 2019.
This grant will support the exhibition, catalog and programming which is curated by Matt Borruso and Luca Antonucci in October-December this year. The exhibition aims to introduce viewers to King’s small press publishing projects, as well as his zines, ephemera, and illustration work. It will be the first survey of David King’s book projects and graphic design work.
David Anthony King (1948 - 2019) was a British-born artist, graphic designer, and musician best known for designing the Crass symbol. His many varied projects encompassed design, drawing, photography, sculpture, film, video, and radio plays. King was a core member of the New York No Wave band Arsenal, and later the San Francisco post-punk bands Sleeping Dogs and Brain Rust. He generated hundreds of flyers for these bands and others from 1977 to 1988, as well as creating logos, brand identities, and posters for nightclubs like Danceteria, Pravda, and the Peppermint Lounge in New York and the I-Beam in San Francisco.
King made dozens of Xeroxed and offset zines in the late 1970s and 1980s that often accompanied his music projects. In the early 2000s he began self-publishing idiosyncratic small-run books ranging from photographs of J.G Ballard’s home to rock formations in early Western films. In the later 2000s, he released numerous books of graphic design and photography through Colpa Press, &Pens, and Gingko Press.
