Michael Coleman

Michael Coleman is an art director, graphic designer, and printmaker residing the in the mid-century modernized hills of Los Angeles' east side. He apprenticed on print design well before the advent of the Internet, occupying his high school years cutting rubylith films, key lining paste-ups and bootlegging t-shirts; his knuckles still bear the scars from hard lessons learned via pica scales. Fortified by ink-under-nails press work, early 90s street culture and a keen dedication to Modernism, he received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he remained for several years post-graduation as an instructor of Visual Communications. His studio provides art direction and graphic design for clients such as Time Out, Girl Skateboards, Fourstar Clothing Company, (RED), Punk Planet Magazine and Warner Brothers Records. He was the co-founder of Foundation Gallery (2002-2005), a Chicago based gallery, which exhibited the work of printmakers such as Jay Ryan, Aesthetic Apparatus and Serigraphie Populaire. Michael has also curated a number of printmaking exhibitions, including OFF-REGISTER: a survey of contemporary printmaking that traveled to five cities throughout 2007-2008, and GIG: a contemporary survey of poster makers inspired by the archives of WB Records. His own serigraphs, abstract explorations of urban landscapes, have been exhibited internationally.