pop culture

Thomas Hine writes about the relationships between people and the objects they desire, buy and use. His work on materialism and its meaning has appeared in many magazines, and his six books have been recognized as important contributions to their fields. He has been praised in the New Yorker by John Updike for his “mischievously alert sensibility,” and "Populuxe," a word he coined to describe some of the styles and enthusiasms of post-World War II America, has entered the language and now appears in several dictionaries. Among his books are Populuxe, an examination of what newly prosperous Americans thought and bought during the post-World War II era, The Total Package, an examination of how persuasive containers shape people’s understandings of products and themselves, and The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (On a Shag Rug) in the 1970s. He was as multimedia editor of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and he has helped organize exhibitions on design and culture for museums in Los Angeles and Newport Beach, Miami, Denver, Washington, and Philadelphia. He was architecture and design critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer for 23 years and is currently the newspaper’s chief art critic. He is a graduate of Yale and lives in Philadelphia.

Through graphic design investigations using the lens of sports to make work on a variety of topics including form, aesthetics, communication, commercialism, and masculinity I consider my work to be under the format of visual journalism. The exists to investigate these niche and overlooked areas within the dominant force of culture that is sports, and that is the story I aim to tell. My work strives to shed light on that other side of sports that may be overlooked, and tell stories, find flaws, and understand a monolithic force in popular culture that is also a mirror into the human experience. My thesis work continues this series of research to now look into the spiritual and religious side of running and commercialism of workout culture. Using graphic design, visual communication, and branding I will create a spiritual group based around the idea of "The Runner's High." I am interested in fitness and sports being co-opted into brands and sold as a way of living. The end of the outcome of the thesis work is to exist as an online website and resource.