Leslie Marlene Siegel

The Dingbat 2.0 publication includes the 1995 John Chase essay about the ongoing photographic project of Lesley Marlene Siegel, "Apartment Living Is Great," which focuses on the decorative signage adorning dingbat apartments. With over 2,300 photographs, Siegel not only documented and categorized signage types and the stories behind their names, she also began collecting the physical signs themselves as a means of preserving fragments of dingbats as they disappeared, often replaced by larger apartment buildings, or those facing demolition after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Whereas Ed Ruscha identified the emerging dingbat type in his artwork in the ’60s, and Judy Fiskin cataloged it as a weathering and aging type by the early ’80s, by the early ’90s Siegel recognized the dingbat’s status as an endangered species.

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