THE SMILE FACE MUSEUM
History of the Museum
in that location, with over 400 hundred items on display.
In 2014, The Smile Face Museum will be installed in Brooklyn, New York in the basement of a private garden apartment. Its collection
now encompasses over 1000 objects, and it will be on display March 30 - April 27. This website was developed to catalog it
and make its collection available for viewing World Wide.
This presentation of the Smile Face Museum is organized by Adrienne Garbini, and hosted by 228 1/2. It will feature Sachs' collection,
the collection of Rita Mageary, and items from local Brooklyn collectors. The Museum will also feature exhibitions of contemporary artwork.
The Museum will host several events, including tours and a film screening.
Exhibitions and Events Calendar coming soon.
About the Curators, Collectors, Hosts, and Artists
Adrienne Garbini is Curator and Director of Operations of the Smile Face Museum. She is an artist and writer based in Colorado and
Brooklyn, New York. She became involved with the museum while working on her Master's thesis, Metaphysics (2013), a 9 channel
video installation and publication concerning the face. She maintains a research image collection devoted to the form.
Rita Mageary was a smile face collector for 30 years, based in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her collection was donated to the Museum in 2010.
Catherine Czacki is the Acquisitions Manager of the Smile Face Museum. She is an artist based in San Diego, California - currently
obtaining her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice.
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Full list of participants coming soon!
History of the Smile Face
The Smile Face has played a defining role in visual culture since its inception as an icon in the mid 20th century.
Stylized images of a happy face have been found in archaeological sites dating back thousands of years in locations ranging
from France
to Pueblo Indian sites in New Mexico.
Modern references to the Smile Face date from a cartoon image of a laughing face in a 1953 movie poster.
A promotional campaign for
a radio station in New York employed a stylized smiling face on a yellow sweatshirt
in 1962 with the tag line "WMCA Good Guy".
The first credited use of smiling face combined with a yellow circle is the graphic image produced by Harvey Ball in
1963 to improve morale
at State Mutual Life Assurance of Worcester, Massachusetts.
The designer stated that button had a "sunny" feel.
Another noted origin of the icon was its use in an advertising campaign created by David Stern.
He combined the image with the lyric
"Put on a Happy Face" from the musical Bye, Bye, Birdie.
Stern later employed the image in his 1993 run for Seattle Mayor.
The first commercial-scale effort to promote the Smile Face icon was the work of Bernard and Murray Spain of Philadelphia
in the early
1970's. They combined the image with the slogan "Have a happy day" and printed it on a variety of objects
including buttons, coffee mugs,
t-shirts and bumper stickers. The common greeting “Have a nice day” eventually became
associated with the Smile Face.
Several attempts have been made to trademark the icon. Frenchman Franklin Loufrani’s company Smile World, Ltd. succeeded
in
registering the trademark in over a hundred countries. Wal-Mart contested his claim in the United States with an
application of their own.
This matter was resolved in a court decision in 2008 that declared that the Smile Face is not
a "distinctive" mark and cannot be owned
in the United States.
The Smile Face is a ubiquitous part of mass media as well as an ambiguous personal statement. In 2002, Lucas John Helder
produced a
manifesto against technology and the unhappiness he believed it caused. He placed pipe bombs in locations around
the mid-west. When
plotted on a map, they formed the image of a Smile Face.
The icon has been satirized and adapted endlessly. The band Nirvana incorporated a dead Smile Face into its logo, inspired
by a strip club
sign in Seattle. The symbol has become so much a piece of our consciousness that we have seen it on a crater
on Mars and created in some
of our first experiments with nanotechnology.
Although the common usage of the symbol ebbs and flows, the Smile Face icon is a fundamental figure in our culture that is
unlikely to fade.
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