Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

The synergetic partnership of Jayme Odgers and April Greiman yielded results that helped defined an era of West Coast design and aesthetics. The pair collaborated on many commissions, including for the Olympics, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and Peter Shire, and created original works, most well-known of which are likely their laminated Spacemats. While both artists trained with revered designers — Odgers with Paul Rand and April Greiman with Armin Hofman — their collaborations would birth something new, explosive, and entirely of their moment.

Recognized as one of the earliest graphic designers to embrace emerging digital technologies, Greiman met Odgers when, in 1976, she moved to Los Angeles from New York, where she had worked as a freelance designer for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1977, the pair worked together on a brochure for CalArts, and, five years later, Greiman became head of the institute's design department — which she successfully renamed as Visual Communications.

Formally, Odgers and Greiman established and worked as the firm Visual Energy for three years. Asked by Steven Heller to describe their style and approach, Odgers said, "[April and I] certainly didn’t verbalize any particular aesthetic beyond 'blendo.' No theorizing, for sure. If anything it was the opposite— a sense of freedom without rules, without structure or theory. April studied Swiss Design under Armin Hofman in Basel, me under Rand; perhaps it was our desire to break out of that highly structured approach—to be loose, free, anarchic, subversive, against the norm, but with West Coast colors..."