With artistry fit for a museum, Norman A. Darais (BA ’71, MA ’73) and McRay Magleby’s Parrot (below) first occupied a humbler perch: a college bulletin board. Created in 1992 as a poster reminding students to register for class, the piece was one of a series that hung in BYU hallways from 1978 to 1996. Magleby’s designs, adorned with Darais’s small-but-witty text—“Why settle for a fly-by-night schedule?”— flipped the word-heavy poster on its head.
Printing each silk-screen poster was labor-intensive, requiring squeegeeing colors, layer by layer, through custom stencils. This tropical parrot—one of Magleby’s favorite designs—was especially complex. To create the blended gradients, different inks were carefully placed and then pulled simultaneously across the screen for a smooth finish.
When they saw the posters, many students became “unwitting art collectors,” says Kyriaki Colasante Oteo (BA ’02, MA ’08), Museum of Art educator. They found them “beautiful enough to tear down” and take home.
Decades later, the posters appeared at BYU again this year, this time in the Museum of Art. The exhibit featured Magleby and Darais’s collaborations, as well as solo works by Magleby, including Peace Wave, created for the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing; the 2002 Olympics logo; and the Young Women’s torch.
