Brutal DC x SUMA —
Southern Utah Museum of Art

Work with great people, and the work that you do doesn’t automatically become great. But as a general rule of thumb, it can quite often help.

‘Brutal DC’ was the brainchild of Ty Cole and Angela Person. Through a mutual passion for Brutalist architecture, this project represented a natural meeting-point between a talented architectural photographer, and a highly respected associate professor of architecture at OU.

The resulting exhibtion was more than just a celebration of the last remaining Brutalist buildings standing in Washington DC. It too, stands with a strong vision to help preserve these last buildings, and also sow the seeds for their properous future.

When SUMA (the Southern Utah Museum of Art) expressed a desire to host the exhibition, Ty kindly reached out with a request to help create the exhibition visual identity. The result was a fully flexible design system that brought together some of the simplistic graphic forms of Paul McNeil and Hamish Muir‘s typeface ‘U_Line’, with the characterful and delightful ‘Raisonée’, by Colophon.

The exhibition opened in Cedar City just as the first leaves began to fall during the autumn of 2023. It was such a success that over the spring of 2024, it migrated to the National Building Museum in Washington DC. This time under a new exhibition title: ‘Capital Brutalism’. With the exception of the name, all other elements of the visual system were preserved for this repeat show - now well documented - in the nation’s capital.