‘Primarium: A case for cursive’ exhibition finishes its run at the HMCT Gallery

This week marks the closing of ‘Primarium: A case for cursive’, an exhibition at the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography (HMCT) Gallery at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. The exhibition was based on the research done by TypeTogether in its Primarium project, which studies how handwriting is taught in countries worldwide.

“We were so pleasantly surprised when we found out that HMCT wanted to put together an exhibition based on our work on the Primarium project,” says TypeTogether co-founder Veronika Burian, who together with co-founder José Scaglione visited the exhibition and gave a talk on the project at its opening (see video). “The care exhibition designers and curators Lavinia Lascaris and Ximena Amaya put into presenting the exhibition far exceeded anything we could have imagined.”

In engaging wall displays and videos, the exhibition tells the story of how cursive writing developed and spread. A particularly engaging timeline charted key milestones in the development of cursive models worldwide from 400 B.C. to present, illustrating how different styles emerged and influenced those that followed. The exhibition also beautifully presented the Playwrite type superfamily, which emerged as one of the products of the Primarium research.

The exhibition also featured interviews with experts in handwriting instruction, cognitive science, and motor development such as Ann Bessemans and Anca-Georgiana Simion, both of whom made strong arguments for the teaching of cursive writing to children as a way of developing fine motor skills as well as cognitive improvements.

We would like to thank everyone involved in making the ‘Primarium: A case for cursive’ exhibition such a success. If you would like to take a deeper dive into the Primarium research, visit the website at www.primarium.info.