Rich Silverstein: I Read the News Today Oh Boy

On June 26, Minnesota Street Project will open I Read the News Today Oh Boy, a solo presentation by Rich Silverstein. The exhibition will feature a series of works that Silverstein made reflecting on the Trump era, created by using text and images that he hand-ripped from The New York Times.

Silverstein is a leader in the field of advertising and design and co-chairman and partner of leading advertising firm Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P). As a partner at GS&P, he has won nearly every award in advertising, including the Cannes Lion of St. Mark, the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, the One Club Hall of Fame and the Clios Hall of Fame, among others. He was also named Executive of the Decade by Adweek, along with his partner Jeff Goodby, and GS&P was named Most Innovative Ad Agency by Fast Company.

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with the news. Later graphic design, typography and images printed on newsprint were even more compelling to me,” said Silverstein of his life and work. Silverstein graduated from Parsons School of Design and worked as an art director at Rolling Stone magazine, among other organizations, before founding GS&P. This project represents the intersection of his personal and professional interests, drawing on his longtime experience in graphic design, advertising and editorial to reflect on the politics of our current era.

The project initially began on Wednesday, November 25, 2019, with the goal of documenting Donald Trump’s impeachment by tearing full-width banner headlines out of The New York Times and using them to create collage-based artworks. At the time, Silverstein referred to the project as 85 Days, though it quickly expanded far beyond Trump’s initial impeachment trial to include the election of President Biden, the storming of the Capitol and Trump’s second impeachment hearing. Each morning Silverstein would read the morning paper and deliberately rip out key sections of texts that felt particularly relevant or stirring. Over the course of the events that unfolded during the pandemic, Silverstein’s project expanded beyond Trump’s first impeachment trial, and 85 Days became a single, large-scale work that was part of a much larger exhibition.

Among the works on view will be 85 Days, a large-scale, text-based collage that will be installed on the floor of the gallery and can be reconfigured like a puzzle to create different narratives. The black-and-white work brings together short headlines, single impactful words and words collaged together from various stories taken from Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Also on view will be the exhibition’s title work, I Read the News Today Oh Boy, which calls attention to Trump’s misunderstanding and mislabeling of hypersonic missiles, underscoring the great irresponsibility of the Trump administration.

These works, among other text-based artworks, will be presented alongside a series of photograph and diptychs that explore Trump’s presidency, his legacy and the beginning of the Biden administration. One large diptych features John Trumbull’s painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence (which hangs in the Capitol Building) paired with a photograph from Trump’s acquittal celebration at the White House, juxtaposing the gravity with which the Founding Fathers held the law with the previous administration’s scorn for it. Another large-scale diptych pairs a photograph of militarized police preparing for a Black Lives Matter protest in Seattle with an image of a single guard at the Capitol Building fighting off the masses of rioters protesting Trump’s defeat, another grave reflection on our social and political moment in time.

Taken together, the works serve not only as a document of the tumultuous past few years, but also as a reflection on Silverstein’s creative outlet during the COVID-19 pandemic and the opportunity it afforded him to tie together his interests over the past several decades to create a singular exhibition.