Marcus Ratliff was an artist and graphic designer who for more nearly 40 years ran his own Manhattan-based company, Marcus Ratliff Inc., helping artists, galleries, museums, and publishers communicate the complexity and immediacy of visual art through typography and other visual language.
A founder of the Judson Gallery, during the late 1950s he participated in the art and performance scene in downtown New York, showing his work alongside the early exhibitions of his friends Tom Wessellmann, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine; after he retired from graphic design, he spent the last twenty years of his life making collages in Vermont.
Born on September 20, 1935, he grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, the youngest of three children raised by his mother, Jeannette, a switchboard operator, and his father, Don, who drove city streetcars and worked for General Electric. A fifth-grade teacher, noticing his art ability, singled him out to create chalk murals on the science-room blackboards, in order to commemorate Thomas Edison’s 100th birthday. Astonished by the opportunity, Marcus looked in books, gathered ideas about Edison’s inventions and their impact, and began to draw, spending the day alone in the classroom while the other students attended an outdoor track meet. “I had the greatest day I could ever remember,” he said later.
For two years he attended the University of Cincinnati, which did not have a studio art pro- gram, until he learned about the tuition-free Cooper Union in New York. He took eleven-hour bus trips to sit for the two entrance exams and was admitted, starting in 1955. There he studied painting and design, interrupting his three-year program with a year-long sojourn in Europe, including a revelatory stay in Florence.
During his time as a student in New York he lived at the Judson Student House, at 239 Thompson Street, in back of the Judson Church, where the minister, Bud Scott, acted as its missionary to the artistic community, making church space available for exhibitions and per- formances. There Marcus helped start the Judson Gallery, in a basement storage-room space, where his own work was exhibited as well as that of his friends and colleagues including Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, and Phyllis Yampolsky; other friends in the scene around the gallery included Eva Hesse, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, Jay Milder, and Bob Thompson. As exhibitions of the new art began to blur into live-action performances, or happenings, he took part in Jim Dine’s happening “Car Crash” at the Reuben Gallery in 1960. He played a car, wearing a dress. (Some of this period has been covered in two recent publications: Inventing Downtown: Artist-run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965, by Melissa Rachleff, accompanying an exhibit at New York University’s Grey Gallery; and Happenings: New York, 1958-1963, by Mildred L. Glimcher.) As an outgrowth of his association with the Judson House, he became art director of Exodus, a literary magazine that lasted for three issues, edited by Scott and Dan Wolf, founding editor of the Village Voice.
Marcus’s paintings from that time aligned with the jitters and irony of New York art after abstract expressionism—mixed-media, rough and playful, full of everyday totems and trans- formed shards of advertising. But he turned to graphic design full-time after graduation, and worked in the art department of Time-Life books and Fortune magazine, where two important things happened. He met Jennie Freeman, a young Oxford graduate from London who had traveled far to start anew, as he had. They married in 1963. And he started freelancing on the side, greatly helped by the gallery owner Leo Castelli, who changed Marcus’ life by lining up five steady clients for the fledgling designer in a single series of afternoon phone calls.
Incorporated in 1967, Marcus Ratliff Inc. designed hundreds of posters, catalogs, invitations and advertisements for clients including Castelli, Pace, Dwan, Sonnabend, Zabriskie, and the Whitney Museum, during a period when New York galleries and museums had just begun to develop clever ways of spreading the news. (Some of this is covered in the book The Jean Freeman Gallery Does Not Exist, by the art historian Christopher Howard.) Sometimes they radiated the idea or essence of the artist and the work, such as an invitation designed for Robert Smithson’s Mono Lake Nonsite exhibition at Dwan Gallery in 1969: one inch high by thirty-inches long, acordion-folded, with type on one side and an unbroken strip of a United States map connecting Northern California’s Mono Lake to New York City on the other. Or sometimes they simply presented news of the event, in clear and elegant type and layout. For years Marcus’s work stood out within the gallery advertisements of the New York Times and the Village Voice. (The area containing Adrian Piper's Mythic Being project within her 2018 MOMA exhibition A Synthesis of Intuitions included a wall of framed Village Voice gallery-ad pages from 1974; it was possible to discern Marcus's ads from across the room.) His work in graphic design around visual art was shown in retrospective exhibitions at Multiples, in New York City, in 1972; and at the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati in 2014.
For a time during the early 1970s Marcus moved his family to West London and worked in two cities simultaneously, designing the English magazine Studio International. By this time Marcus and Jennie had sons: Marcus, of Sharon, VT, and Ben, of Bronx, NY. (They survive him, as well as his daughters in law Amanda Ratliff and Kate Reynolds, and four grandsons: Gavin, Luke, Henry, and Toby.) But in the early seventies he eventually resettled with his family to Rockland County, north of New York City, and kept the New York office going.
In 2004, Jennie died of ALS. Marcus folded his design company in 2006. Now living in Vermont, he began creating collages constructed with knives and glue, related by their methods and their humor both to his pre-computer graphic design practice and his own early-60s art making. In recent years he exhibited his work at galleries in New York, Ohio, and New England; he had his final show, The Ladies Room, at the BigTown Gallery in Rochester, VT, in 2017.
An archive of Marcus Ratliff's design work in the visual art world, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, is housed at the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design & Typography at Cooper Union.