Jane Davis Doggett papers

Jane Davis Doggett was born in Morristown, Tennessee, on November 4, 1929, to Annie Kate (Weesner) and Robert Doggett, a contractor and horse breeder. She graduated from Hillsboro High School in Nashville in 1948, and received a BFA from Sophie Newcomb College (Tulane) in 1952. After a year of travel and study in Europe, particularly at the Institute of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, she attended Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture. Doggett majored in the relatively new program of graphic design, established in 1951, and received her MFA in 1956. At Yale, she studied with Josef Albers, Alvin Eisenman, Herbert Matter, Paul Rand, and Vincent Scully.

After Yale, Doggett worked at George Nelson Associates, designing directional signage and exhibitions for Colonial Williamsburg, before working as a photographer for Architectural Record. There she covered the Guggenheim Museum in New York as it was under construction, photographed Alvar Aalto and Pier Luigi Nervi and their work, and attended the International Congress of Architects and Engineers of Moscow in 1958. In 1960, Doggett, along with her former Yale classmate Sheila Hicks and photographer Dorothy Jackson, traveled to Mexico to photograph the work of architect Felix Candela for a traveling exhibition. Doggett and Jackson also founded the firm Architectural Graphics Associates (AGA) together.

One of AGA’s first projects was the design of the Memphis Airport in 1959. As airports were expanding and growing more complex, Doggett responded with a series of innovations that made wayfinding in vast, unfamiliar surroundings easier on visitors. Using signage that was part of the architecture, relying on simple systems of letter-color-number instead of compass points and company names, and creating “placemarks” that helped people orient themselves with colorful symbols rather than lengthy text, Doggett and AGA pioneered the field that would come to be known as environmental graphics design. Their designs for Memphis Airport received the 1961 American Institute of Architects Award of Merit, the first time the AIA honored architectural graphics design. Doggett would go on to design over 40 international airports, including Baltimore-Washington Internation Airport, Tampa International Airport, and Houston’s George Bush International Airport. She also worked on other large wayfinding and branding projects, notably Madison Square Garden, the Philadelphia Metro transit system, and Vanderbilt Medical Center.

In addition to these projects, Doggett served as an Aesthetics Advisor for the National Advisory Committee on Traffic Control Devices in the Department of Transportation (1965-1975) and was an adjunct professor at the University of Bridgeport, where she taught an architectural graphics design course (1971-1974). In 1976, AGA set up a satellite office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and in 1988 Doggett designed her residence on Jupiter Island, Florida.

Doggett’s creativity was also expressed in her artwork. Beginning in 2000, she embarked on a series she dubbed “IconoChromes” or “Talking Graphics,” in which philosophical messages were conveyed via simple, colorful graphic images. This resulted in museum exhibitions, a series of books, and related merchandise. Her sculptural work, “23rd Psalm,” was acquired by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2012, and is on permanent loan to the Saint Thomas More Catholic Chapel and Center. She was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2016, and in 2018 received the Society for Experiential Graphic Design Fellow award. The same year, a documentary film about her life and career, Jane Davis Doggett: Wayfinder in the Jet Age, was released, and aired on PBS in 2019.

Doggett died on April 10, 2023, in Sun City Center, Florida.