A couple of years ago we heard from Dr. Gary Genosko, the Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University. He was working on the first ever book about Harley Parker (1915-1992) who was a Canadian typographer, painter and exhibition designer, and Marshall “the medium is the message” McLuhan‘s collaborator. Parker’s family had given Dr. Genosko a copy of Parker’s Karsh portrait, and they kindly shared it with us.
Dr. Genosko has recently published an article about the search for a lost manuscript of Harley Parker’s book, The Culture Box: Museums.
Canadian typographer, painter and exhibition designer Parker was media thinker Marshall McLuhan’s collaborator and right-hand man. He was popularly known as the “McLuhan of the museum”. Parker’s career as general display chief at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto stretched from 1957-1968, and the experimental gallery he mounted at the Museum of the City of New York in 1967 was a touchpoint for his progressive ideas about museums as perceptual laboratories.