Milton Glaser

Individual Information

Biographical / Historical Note

Milton Glaser was born in the Bronx in 1929 and attended New York City’s High School of Music and Art and the Cooper Union art school in New York, from which he graduated in 1951. He studied with Giorgio Morandi, via a Fulbright Scholarship, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. In 1954, Glaser, along with Seymour Chwast, Reynold Ruffins, Edward Sorel, founded Push Pin Studios. He and Chwast directed the organization for twenty years, which had a profound effect on graphic design. In 1968, he co-founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker, a publication that established a new format and style for city magazines. Glaser was president and design director until 1977.

In 1974 Glaser established Milton Glaser, Inc. The studio has worked in a wide variety of design disciplines. The studio has produced identity programs for many corporate and institutional organizations; their print graphics include logos, stationery, brochures, signage, and annual reports. The studio has been responsible for many environmental and interior projects, including exhibitions, interiors and exteriors of restaurants, shopping malls, supermarkets, hotels, and other retail and commercial environments. Glaser has also designed and illustrated of more than 300 posters for clients in the areas publishing, music, theater, film, institutional and civic enterprise, as well as those for commercial products and services.
Glaser’s commissions include the I Love NY logo, commissioned by the state of New York in 1976;
the design of a 600-foot mural for the New Federal Office Building in Indianapolis in 1974; and the complete graphic and decorative programs for the restaurants in the World Trade Center. He has also designed a number of architectural projects including Sesame Place, a children’s educational play
park in Pennsylvania. Over the course of fifteen years, Milton Glaser was involved with the re-design
of a principal American supermarket chain, Grand Union, a project that included all the company architecture, interiors, and packaging. In 1987, Mr. Glaser was responsible for the graphic program of the Rainbow Room complexes for the Rockefeller Center Management Corporation, New York. From 1986– 1989, he was responsible for the graphic design, theming, and signage for Franklin Mills, a retail mall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and in 1988, he completed the exterior, interior, and all graphic elements of Trattoria dell’Arte, one of several New York restaurants he has designed. In 1993, he designed the logo for Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Angels in America.

Glaser teamed with Walter Bernard in 1983 to form the publication design firm WBMG. The firm has been responsible for the design for more than fifty periodicals around the world including The Washington Post, La Vanguardia in Barcelona, and O Globo in Rio de Janeiro (the work of WBMG is represented only in small part in the Milton Glaser Collection).

Milton Glaser has been an instructor and a Board Member at the School of Visual Arts, New York since 1960, and is on the Board of Directors at The Cooper Union, New York. He has been affiliated with The International Design Conference in Aspen since 1972 (president 1990–91), and the American Institute of Graphic Arts, where he was vice-president and co-chair of the 1989 National Convention. He is the recipient of The Society of Illustrator’s Gold Medal, the St. Gauden’s Medal from The Cooper Union,
and the Prix Savignac for the World’s Most Memorable Poster of 1996. Milton Glaser is a member of The Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). He holds honorary doctorates from The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Moore College; Philadelphia Museum School; The School of Visual Arts; Queens College, CUNY; the New York University at Buffalo, and London’s Royal College of Art. He is an elected member of the Pinocateca in Bologna, Italy, and in 1992 received
the Honors Awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He received the 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, for his profound and meaningful long-term contribution to the contemporary practice of design.

Glaser’s artwork has been featured in exhibits worldwide, including one-man shows at both the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1977) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1975). He has also exhibited at the Lincoln Center Gallery, New York (1981) and the Houghton Gallery at The Cooper Union, also in New York (1984). His work is in the permanent collections of many museums.