Conceptual artist and graphic designer Stephen Rumbaugh with his new art exhibition, “Endangered and Extinct,” on display at WYSO. (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
‘Endangered and Extinct’— The analog, archived
- Published: October 3, 2026
The illustrations in Stephen Rumbaugh’s “Endangered and Extinct” are larger than life, quite literally: A movie-rental membership card bears a signature in black ink; a single sheet from a steno pad is miraculously free of its spiral binding, every cut-out circle along its top edge intact; a fax cover sheet waits for a sender, recipient and number. All of them bear striking verisimilitude to the real-world items they represent, but much larger than their original size, and behind glass — artifacts to be inspected.
Rumbaugh, a Yellow Springs-based graphic designer and conceptual artist, has filled the newly named Dr. Bob Brandt Jr. Event Space at WYSO with 28 such “specimens,” on display now through Nov. 30. Each piece, for the edification — and amusement — of gallery-goers is accompanied by a mock-scientific classification, a fictional Latin name and a conservation status: endangered or extinct.
Take the humble steno pad, Tabula Notatio Celeris, hanging on the back wall of the event space, and marked as “endangered.” Its accompanying text describes a tool that once facilitated “real-time capture of speech in offices, courtrooms and classrooms,” its design supporting the bodily practice of “listening and frantic writing simultaneously.”
There was some irony in reading that description while interviewing Rumbaugh: A digital recorder was capturing the conversation for automatic transcription. Meanwhile, back at the News office, drawers remain heavy with stacks of the self-same top-bound notebooks, already filled by this reporter and those who came before.
Thus, “Endangered and Extinct” lives somewhere within the overlap between what’s disappeared or disappearing and what’s still hanging on.
“Basically, this exhibit is about paying homage to a time that’s gone, and remembering things that I hadn’t thought about for years,” Rumbaugh said.
The series is steeped in a sense of nostalgia, sure, but it sprung, Rumbaugh said, from a real-world, contemporary desire — specifically, nearly two years ago, when his young niece was playing restaurant. She was running around, taking pretend orders on a Post-it note, and Rumbaugh decided to put his talents toward improving the illusion, making his niece a full set of restaurant materials: menus, guest checks, even the little sleeves into which diners tuck their credit cards at meal’s end.
“After I had that done, I thought, ‘Oh, this is really kind of cool,’” Rumbaugh said. “And then I started looking around at other things.”
There’s a particular pleasure, as a child, in being handed the discarded stuff of adulthood — an expired checkbook, an old form, a receipt book. Rumbaugh remembered it as he started looking for and into the other bits of paper that had once, as he put it, “choreographed ordinary life,” like air mail stamps, boarding passes, Scantron sheets, punch-clock cards. Rumbaugh knew that young pleasure himself, as his father built houses and kept an office attached to the family home in Wooster, Ohio, where Rumbaugh grew up.
“When he wasn’t in there, I spent many hours in his office playing office,” he said.
The young Rumbaugh dug discarded forms from the trash, made new ones on his dad’s typewriter and typed his own little newspapers. Eventually, the lines and contours Rumbaugh encountered in play would become his professional bread and butter as a graphic designer.
In point of fact, Rumbaugh has contributed local designs that have illuminated some of the same ephemera that show up in his exhibition: After moving to Yellow Springs in the early 1990s, he did graphic design work for a number of local businesses, creating menus, logos and other printed materials — including ads that appeared in the News on behalf of local clients. For Sunrise Cafe, he once created a custom guest check tailored to the restaurant’s menu.
Before leaving the village for Tennessee in 2017 — he returned to Yellow Springs with his partner, Will Davis, two years ago — one of his final local projects was the logo for Yellow Springs Hardware. Now, he’s a practitioner in residence at Wright State University, where he’s working to help build a new academic program.
If you enter the event space at WYSO via the door nearest the restrooms, the first piece in “Endangered and Extinct” will be Rumbaugh’s take on the classic guest check — and though it’s documentary-accurate, it’s neither a scan nor a photograph of a surviving object. Rumbaugh created it, and every other piece in the show, in Adobe Illustrator, drawing with a mouse.
“They’re not actual documents,” he said. “They’re almost like very flat still lifes.”
To give the images verisimilitude, Rumbaugh said he researched old typefaces, logos, colors and printing styles. For one piece, he tracked down obsolete financial-company logos on vintage mugs for sale online and used them as references.
The resulting images occupy a strange middle ground between memory and invention. They look enough like the real thing to trigger recognition, but also a sense of hyperreality — enlarged and removed from their contexts, and thus presented, as Rumbaugh wrote in an artist’s statement, so that viewers might “look past their utility and appreciate their intrinsic design language.”
Visitors might also notice some details that belong to Rumbaugh: Several addresses nod to Wooster, and a recurring name, Felix P. Swan, is the moniker of a fictional bureaucrat Rumbaugh has been developing for a possible future project.
“Visitors to the gallery … they all have favorites, and they spark memories,” Rumbaugh said. “It’s one of these exhibits that’s sort of about the forest more than the trees.”
Rumbaugh added that he and his father built the frames that hold each image from acacia scraps cast off by the furniture industry; the glass was salvaged from secondhand frames Rumbaugh collected at area thrift stores, then cleaned and recut.
One piece reaches particularly close to home: a newspaper carrier collection card, the kind once carried on a metal ring by delivery workers to track which houses received papers and when payment was due. Its description calls it part of “a small-scale economy built on routine and personal interaction” — another vestige of a print-news world whose rituals have already changed considerably, even as newspapers themselves remain (for now).
Visitors are invited to leave behind a small physical record of their own attendance. Near the exhibition sits a guest book that can be signed conventionally with pen — or typed, with considerably more force, on a vintage Royal typewriter.
“You really have to hit hard on those keys,” Rumbaugh said, demonstrating for this reporter. “It’s not like your cell phone or your computer, even.”
The physical resistance he noted — the weight, sound, texture and even the occasional inconvenience of the things depicted throughout “Endangered and Extinct” — is part of what Rumbaugh said disappears when a human practice moves behind a screen.
“That’s all gone with the digital experience,” he said. “There’s no smell, there’s no taste — I mean, I should say, not yet anyway.”
“Endangered and Extinct” is on display through Nov. 30 at WYSO, located at 314 Dayton St. and open Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m. Station Manager Luke Dennis asks guests to ring the front doorbell for entry.
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