Liquor Labels
Posted by: Tom Rieke
Tomie Ohtake was born in Kyoto, but when China was threatening to invade Japan in 1936, her parents decided to find a more peaceful place to live, so they joined the Japanese exodus to São Paulo, where she married and raised a middle-class family. She never planned to be an artist, but she always loved the calligraphy and art she remembered from her childhood, so a few years before her 40th birthday, she started painting. Fifty years later, she is one of the most famous artists in Brazilian history.
Paulo Darzé Galeria de Arte: images and more info about Tomie Ohtake
One of many tributes to her contribution to Brazilian culture is this commercial tower in São Paulo, designed by her son, Ruy. The first three floors are the Instituto de Tomie Ohtake: eight exhibition rooms, a video room, a theater, an auditorium, a bookstore, a café, and a good restaurant.
April's shows included Relicário, an amazing retrospective of 2D and 3D objects by Vik Muniz, another one of Brazil's superstar artists (no photos allowed) and a design extravaganza: a collection of cachaça labels.
Cachaça is Brazil's version of liquor distilled from sugar cane. Like rum, it started out as rough booze that slaves and sailors drank to numb their pain. Now it's featured in hipster bars worldwide, in caparinhas.
In the 19th century, there were thousands of brands of cachaça. Many of them still exist. The Instituo Tomie Ohtake displayed over 400 cachaça labels from the 1950s collected by Egeu Laus, who designs CD packages for superstar musicians and studies, collects, and writes about Brazilian popular music.
The labels were organized in categories: Typography, Indigneous People, Animals, Events and People, Pin-Ups, Landscapes and Places, and Humor.
I think Tomie Ohtake loves this show. Labels are not trivia. They sell everything we buy, and they employ millions of people everywhere. So label design is a very important human activity. It's seen by billions of people thousands of times a day. That's why good label designers are so serious about their work.
They also know how to celebrate life.
