For me, the piece [April Greiman and I] did for WET Magazine, a publication that epitomized West Coast lifestyle at that time, represents our quintessential California Design look. It’s a strange salmagundi of disparate elements and styles, definitely irreverent, oh so colorful, with our requisite Japanese overtones, especially the gradation with which I was obsessed, and a quasi-religious subtext.
—Jayme Odgers, interviewed by Steven Heller for Print


Visual Energy
Jayme Odgers & April Greiman

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..."


Once we got together, April and I made a great team—she was style-based, I was content-based. She was typographic-based, I was image-based. She is right-handed, I’m left...She is female and I am male. The reason I feel this is important is that each piece we did together carried male/female qualities which appealed to the widest possible audience.
Jayme Odgers


Seeing and Being
The Expansive Visions of Jayme Odgers
by Marian Lawrence

Jayme Odgers was a transformative, visionary artist whose work constantly pushed boundaries and defined a generation. Over the arc of his life as a graphic designer and artist, he continually reinvented his engagement with content, form, and style, perpetually redefining how one might see the world. Odgers’s body of work spans the strict constructs of Modernist graphics, the pre-digital experimental photographic collaging known as photo-design, the structured chaos of the Pacific Wave movement that he pioneered, and the introspective personal work that represented his relentless pursuit of spiritual growth and intellectual challenge. This collection offers a survey of Odgers’s expansive career, showcasing the development, range, and depth he possessed as a true original, an incredible polymath, a great communicator, and groundbreaking artist.
Early in his career, Odgers displayed an aptitude for Modernist design: in his work with the legendary Paul Rand in the 1960s (and later, his own commercial practice), Odgers brilliantly employed the rigid principles of modernism to create award-winning corporate identity materials — indeed it was his early wayfinding signage for IBM that attracted Rand as an employer and mentor. Odgers brought a sophisticated, lively viewpoint and exceptional technical skills to these commissions, becoming quite successful over the span of thirteen years.


I feel my better works are infused with a metaphysical space as well as an illusion of physical space – infinite space at best. At that point they come “tantras” of a sort; images that allow one’s mind to expand out-wardly to the edges of one’s known universe. When meditated upon one can hopefully “hear” the universe and sense the pulse. When I’m hot, and I’m cooking, that’s the soup I’m after. Celestial soup.
Jayme Odgers