After exploring body movement for 80 years (ballet, flamenco, mime and modern dance), a leading Puerto Rican theater figure thought it fit—as her swan song—to collect her memorabilia in a publication, including artwork, set and costume designs, photos (portraits, live action), original programs, posters and press clippings. Widely admired, Gilda Navarra was a muse to many artists in America and Europe, as evidenced by myriad texts and images.
Music played an important role in Ms. Navarra’s signature pieces, usually developed for silent characters. The book was thus conceived as a musical piece itself. Its design is based on an everpresent pentagram, often evident, at times suggested or just implied. Because music provides graphic representations of silence—lacking in conventional language—these symbols become metaphors for different “times” in the artist’s everchanging, transcendental oeuvre.
AIGA 50 BOOKS / 50 COVERS 2007 SELECTION
The challenge: How to portray the idea of silence through mediums and techniques that rely on additive processes and techniques? The cover was made with white touché paper, embossed and foil stamped.
On the cover, a fermata, the notation for a note that is sustained for longer than its note value, hints that Gilda (hence the capital G illustrated in her embroidery style) manipulated music, theater and time in an idiosyncratic way. The whiteonwhiteonwhite further explores the expression of silence, but on purely graphic terms.
Structural design system following a pentagram rubric.
Sample spreads.