Graphic designer Richard Niessen will lecture at the LSU College of Art & Design as part of the Paula G. Manship Endowed Lecture Series at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 16, 2016, in the LSU Design Building Auditorium (room 103).

Niessen (Edam-Volendam, 1972) graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 1996. Ever since he has continued to work on a collection that he calls “Typographic  Masonry,” the almost hermetic craft of forging amalgams of signs, symbols, and ornaments in mostly nonlinear structures. This syncretic approach to graphic design, with a predilection for print work, creates a coherent formal language exclusively to the project at hand.

Niessen works for various clients, such artists as Jennifer Tee and Ad de Jong, exhibition spaces as Cobra Museum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and organizations like the Fonds BKVB and Res Artis. In addition, self-initiated projects lead to experiments with exhibition and presentation forms and collaborations with other designers and artists. Neissen created two traveling overview exhibitions of his work: TM City (Chaumont Design Graphique, Chaumont, 2007) and A Hermetic Compendium of Typographic Masonry (Une Saison Graphique, Le Havre, 2014). His most recent project is The Palace of Typographic Masonry, an ongoing series of workshops, debates, and exhibitions organized as an imagined game-like architecture, structuring his method of graphic design and archiving and researching its sources.