A show poster & postcard I designed for a performance of The Elephant Man. This production was specifically created to be a site specific work performed at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, which is a teaching museum full of strange and gruesome human remains, four of which are featured on this poster.
The director’s vision for this was that the “freaks” of the Mutter were welcoming Joseph Merrick aka “The Elephant Man” into a place and a family where he belonged. She also wanted to capture some of the horror and “freak-out” factor of Merrick’s deformity by placing it in this context. The pillars are the pillars that flank the actual museum.
We ended up having some back-and-forth with the museum over the look and wording of the poster. An earlier version featured a deformed fetus in the jar on the left and the “Soap Lady” (a corpse whose flesh has, because of a kind of bacteria, decayed into/been preserved in a soap-like state) on the lower right, both of which are actual exhibits from the museum. Why they requested the change remains unknown to me, but I still like the finished piece.
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