A Look at The RRK American Wood Type Collection with David Shields

UT School of Design and Creative Technologies

Join us for this in-person event during which David Shields will guide us through the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection.

Harry Ransom Center

Creatives on Campus

A speaker series presented by the School of Design and Creative Technologies

<h2><strong>About the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection (The RRK)</strong></h2><p>The RRK is a collection of American nineteenth-century wood type assembled by the noted design educator, collector, and historian Rob Roy Kelly (1925–2004). Kelly began collecting wood type from local printers in the late 1950s for use by his students at the Minneapolis College of Art &amp; Design, and continued adding to the collection over the next decade. In early 1966, unable to maintain the unwieldy assortment of wood types he had gathered, Kelly sold the collection to Dr. Bernard Karpel, head librarian of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Later that year, Dr. Karpel sold the collection to the Humanities Research Center—now known as the Harry Ransom Center (HRC)—at The University of Texas at Austin. The RRK is now in the care of the Department of Design in the College of Fine Arts.</p><h2>A﻿bout David Shields</h2><p>David Shields is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He was chair of the department 2012–2021. He was previously an Associate Professor of Design at The University of Texas at Austin, where he served as the Head of the Design Program and as the Design Custodian for the <a href="https://rrk.finearts.utexas.edu/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection</a>. Before joining the UT faculty in 2004, David lived in Brooklyn, NY, and taught at several institutions in the New York region including Rutgers, SVA, Pratt, and University of the Arts.</p>

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A Look at The RRK American Wood Type Collection with David Shields

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A Look at The RRK American Wood Type Collection with David Shields

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