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Interview with Jaime Davidovich and Judith Henry

The following is a condensed edit of separate interviews I conducted with Jaime Davidovich and Judith Henry in June 2012. We discussed the rise and fall of Wooster Enterprises, the influence of Fluxus, the world of retail, and the innumerables ways in which the downtown scene in the Seventies continues to leave a mark on architecture, televisual style, advertising, fashion, and graphic design.
-L.C.

I doubt many people today understand how unusual it was for you, as artist, to be designing stationery in 1976. For instance, the MoMA Design Store didn't open until 1989. How would you describe the relationship between art and graphic design in the 1970s?

Jaime Davidovich: It was completely separate. Today the line is blurry, but then it was clear. Pushpin Studios was hot, especially Milton Glazer, who designed New York magazine and the "I ♥ NY" logo. Also popular was Peter Max. Then came the Supergraphics, doing abstract shapes on buildings.

Judith Henry: Glazer was the big name in graphic design. I couldn't stand that sensibility, that Seventies graphic look. It was everywhere. And our sensibility was so different.

Davidovich: Now if you go to the retail stores you see big close-up photographs on the wall. That kind of thing didn't exist in retail displays those days and it didn't come from graphic arts. It came from Soho.

So today's graphic design is influenced by work that was coming out of Soho in the Seventies.

Davidovich: Not just graphic design. Architectural design—before Soho there were no lofts. They didn't have the concept of an open kitchen. The kitchen was an enclosed room you wanted to hide. You didn't want people to see what was happening in there. The loft idea, with open kitchens, became a style, and it came from Soho. Also fashion. All the performance artists were very influential on fashion designers like Betsey Johnson, Giorgio Armani, Prada. Their concepts came from Soho. The artists were all wearing black before Armani. Everybody in Soho, it was almost like a uniform! Armani captured those ideas and made them commercial.

Graffiti started there. The graffiti artist who became big stars in the '80s, Basquiat and Keith Haring, were working in the neighborhood. The MTV style came from