Rick Griffith

Rick Griffith has been a fixture in Denver's creative sector since arriving in 1996. He is a former Denver Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, Public Art Policy Chair, and founder and partner in MATTER, the ambidextrous design consultancy with a print shop for the public good, design reading room/library, and a bookstore/venue for Denver's intersectional community of revolutionaries, designers, activists, and other thinking persons. MATTER works in intellectual activism—and for over 25 years has been challenging the traditional boundaries of retail and studio practice to become something intentionally unruly, non-binary, collaborative, and pluralistic. He speaks globally on Design, Ethics, Typography, Printing Arts and his prolific creative practice. His works can be found in the permanent collections of The Denver Art Museum, Tweed Museum, New York’s Poster House, the Letterform Archive and The Butler Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Columbia University. In 2025 he spoke at the Museum of Modern Art on Design Ethics and received the AIGA Medal, the highest honor in the United States from a professional organization for design.