Gail Holliday’s iconic posters return for Columbia’s 50th birthday (via Columbia Flier)

Gail Holliday’s iconic posters return for Columbia’s 50th birthday (via Columbia Flier)
Artist Gail Holliday of Yuma, AZ

More than 50 years ago, Gail Holliday left her home state of California for a job in Maryland. Fresh out of college, the young artist had been hired by Jim Rouse to capture his vision, in art, of his new city, Columbia.

Fast forward to the present and Holliday has again traveled across the country, though this time from her home in Arizona, to Columbia, to help preserve an aspect of her work that once greeted visitors to Columbia’s exhibit center — five metal pole “trees” that featured Holliday’s images of Columbia on 25 metal “leaves.”

“Gail had done them very early in Columbia’s history,” said Barbara Kellner, director of the Columbia Archives. “The neighborhood prints had been done on silk screens and at some point painted on these metal pieces and hung. For the better part of 25 years, they were in front of the old exhibition center.”

 

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