About

Professor Gerry Beegan is a design historian, curator, and designer who teaches at Rutgers University. His research focuses on print media, audiences, activism, and urbanism. He has organized exhibitions such as 'Angela Davis — Seize the Time,' which was supported by grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has co-curated and designed exhibitions at the Rutgers University Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. Beegan's work has been reviewed in various publications including Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, LA Weekly, Art in America, and Women’s Art Journal. He has organized programming related to his exhibitions, including online archival events and anti-carceral gatherings. His scholarly contributions include a book titled 'The Mass Image' and chapters on print media and popular culture in several academic publications. Beegan has served in administrative roles at Rutgers, including Undergraduate Director, Department Chair, and Interim Dean of Mason Gross School of the Arts, where he led initiatives to develop the school's design programs and managed the transition to online arts learning during the COVID pandemic.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Art
• Linguistics
• Visual arts
• History
• Multimedia
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Reading Graphic Design History: Image, Text, and Context

  Journal of Design History · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science

  In his introduction David Raizman writes that the choice of subjects for this collection of case studies was in some sense arbitrary. His choices in fact speak to his personal interests, to his teaching philosophy and his biography. Unfortunately this is David Raizman’s final book, published shortly after his sudden and untimely death on 22 February 2021, at the age of sixty-nine. David was Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Drexel University in Philadelphia having retired in 2017. A well-known, highly respected and indeed much-loved figure in North American Design History, obituaries mentioned his warmth and generosity as a scholar and colleague. David is best known as the author of the textbook survey History of Modern Design (Pearson Prentice Hall), originally published in 2003 with a second edition in 2010. However, his initial academic training and research was in medieval Spanish manuscripts and it was in the 1990s that he began to...

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• 15. Women of the World: The Lady’s Pictorial and Its Sister Papers

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2019-04-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Women of the World: The Lady’s Pictorial and Its Sister Papers

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2019-05-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In this essay, Gerry Beegan examines women’s columns in the illustrated papers produced by the Ingram Brothers in the 1880s and 1890s: The <italic>Illustrated London News</italic> (1842–1900), the <italic>Sketch</italic> (1893–1959), and the <italic>Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News</italic> (1874–1943). Images of women were ubiquitous in these weeklies, but it was in the women’s columns that feminist politics were most often addressed. The <italic>Illustrated London News</italic>, for example, sometimes addressed women’s employment and other topics affecting women–controversial subject matter that was safely embedded in an otherwise tame mixture of advice on fashion and cookery. The <italic>Lady’s Pictorial</italic>, founded by the Ingram Brothers in 1880, took a similar approach by mixing conventional feminine subject matter with debates on gender issues. However, while its sister papers were more likely to feature actresses and celebrities in their women’s columns, the <italic>Lady’s Pictorial</italic> depicted women ‘out in the world … enjoying the London social season, attending charitable events, participating in sports, and engaging in amateur drama’ (p. 248). Utilising both text and illustration, it defined a new brand of ‘modern mobile womanhood’ (p. 253).

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• Expanding Nationalisms at World’s Fairs: Identity, Diversity, and Exchange, 1851–1915

  Journal of Design History · 2018-05-31 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This valuable addition to the body of scholarship on international exhibitions focuses on the role of design in communicating the character of emerging nation states. The format of the edited collection is an appropriate vehicle of this large and complex subject. The variety of contributions, which can be a structural problem in some volumes, here becomes a central principal and a strength. This diverse collection is, in a sense, a form of exposition that does justice to the fairs’ internationalist scope, varied viewpoints and rich material complexity. The authors consider the viewing experiences generated by artifacts, their spatial arrangements and their positioning via texts such as guidebooks. Chapters deal with strategies of the architects and organizing committees, and the structures and displays of artifacts and goods they forged. Sites for the creation of unified national histories, fairs were carefully crafted for their specific locations. Pavilions and their contents attempted to coherently connect the ‘authentic’ past with the trajectory of the imagined nation. Yet the collection reveals the malleable nature of these narratives. These nations seem as ephemeral, shifting and fragile as the fairs themselves.

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• The Picturegoer: Cinema, Rotogravure, and the Reshaping of the Female Face

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2018-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  <italic>The Picturegoer</italic>, published by Odhams Press, was the most popular British interwar film magazine. It was a pioneer in the use of rotogravure, a technique that brought high-quality color images to popular periodicals. The gravure process, in which both letterforms and photographs were fundamentally pictorial, challenged the text/image hierarchy, a radical shift reflected in the magazine’s layouts. Rotogravure had no definable matrix and images were smooth, continuous, and delicate; photographic portraits of stars were visually akin to cinematic close-ups. The magazine’s heavily retouched images, alongside articles on fashion and make-up, and an increasing dominance of cosmetic advertising, enabled women to develop an empowering visual expertise. Appearance became democratized and malleable, helping women to negotiate the contradictions of modern female subjectivity. Female readers were able to develop a photogenic face, influenced by Hollywood, shaped by make-up, and modeled on the smooth retouched colour rotogravure

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• Researching technologies of printing and illustration

  2017-07-14 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter identifies a clear-cut narrative of discovery is a chimera, for technologies depend on the overlapping efforts of individuals and industries. It examines a very little scholarship on developments in Victorian printing technology other than Brian Maidment's work on wood engraving. The chapter also examines the lack of scholarship on the history of illustration technology both exciting and daunting. It determines that the most important developments in reproduction occurred in periodicals. The chapter focuses on image reproduction in London even though there were similar developments in other publishing hubs, including New York, Berlin, and Paris. It looks at text and image holistically and to consider the editorial stance of magazines that used process reproduction. It is important to contextualize photographically reproduced pen-andink sketches in relation to adjoining text and images, for each image is potentially in conversation with surrounding content.

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• 12 The PICTUREGOER: Cinema, Rotogravure, and the Reshaping of the Female Face

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2017-12-25 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• IDEO

  The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design · 2016-01-01 · 10 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Founded by Bill Moggridge (1943–2012), Mike Nuttall, and David Kelley in 1991, IDEO is one of the leading international product and systems design consultancies. The firm was a pioneer in undertaking the design of human–computer interaction and integrating it with the design of objects. The firm pra

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• Push Pin Studios

  The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design · 2016-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Founded in New York in 1954, Push Pin Studios became an important force in pop-modernist design. Its leading members, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and Edward Sorel, had studied together at the Cooper Union, a school with a tradition of illustrative design. The studio became well known for its use

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• Letraset

  The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design · 2016-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Letraset was established in 1959 in the UK and pioneered the dry transfer method of producing display type. Letters were individually rubbed down onto mechanicals (camera-ready artwork) to make headlines or logos. The process was time-consuming but it allowed designers to cheaply generate type in a

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Frequent coauthors

• Paul Atkinson

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Hirmer Press catalog publication (2020)
• Andy Warhol Foundation grant
• National Endowment for the Humanities grant