About the Exhibition
21c Museum announces the presentation of Stefan Sagmeister’s Everybody Always Thinks They Are Right, the most ambitious public art project by this internationally renowned artist and graphic designer. Six scowling, 30-foot white monkeys, posed in different positions occupy a stretch of Main and Seventh Streets in Louisville, each of them holding a banner with text that corresponds to a word in the title. Visitors can wander through and around the installation and interact with the monkeys, as they ponder the thought-provoking title of the project.
Everybody Always Thinks They Are Right was originally commissioned for the 2006 Six Cities Design Festival in Scotland, where the monkeys were installed in six different urban venues. The Louisville installation is the first time all six have been shown together; their presentation is the artist’s largest-scale public, outdoor project shown in the US. The installation will remain on view through the month of September, and will be an official event of the 2008 Idea Festival; the monkeys will truly express the theme of the festival: the exchange of ideas.
This project is one of series inspired by the artist’s personal list of guiding principles, which are now the subject of his best-selling book,Things I Have Learned in My Life, So Far. Each of Sagmeister’s life lessons has been illustrated in a variety of formats using materials ranging from food and foliage to photography and video to animals and the artist’s own body. Readers and viewers are encouraged to share what they’ve learned in their own lives through the artist’s website.
About the Artist
Sagmeister’s work spans a wide range of media, from sculpture and graphic design to photography and video to public installations and performance art. His interdisciplinary practice references many of the major art movements of the last forty years, from text-based conceptual art, to site-specific public interventions, to body-based performance art. An artist of the 21st century, Sagmeister dissolves boundaries between genres and between the public and private realms.
Stefan Sagmeister has won every major design award, including a Grammy for his design for a Talking Heads‘ boxed CD set. His work has appeared in publications all over the world, as well as on billboards and buildings, and in installations, videos, and photographs that have been featured in museums, galleries, and in other commercial and public sites in the US, Europe, and Asia. Born and raised in Austria, Sagmeister earned his graduate degree in design as a Fulbright fellow at the Pratt Institute in the Brooklyn, NY. He teaches in the graduate department of design at New York’s School of Visual Arts.
