Blog Page 18 of 5 | SVA Archives

May 20, 2011

Performance for yourself

Allan Kaprow, innovator of the Happening, the Environment, and the Activity, brought his expanded view of art to post-modernism.

April 29, 2011

A distant mirror

In the late-1950s Seventeen magazine was a clearing house for an incredible stable of graphic talent. Among the contributors were many artists and designers associated with the School of Visual Arts, including Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse and others like Rudolf de Harak.

March 31, 2011

McMullan at NYPL

Go see James McMullan’s Lincoln Center Theater posters at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

February 11, 2011

Love letter to NY

The piece will be available for free for the next six days at the BBC web site.

December 21, 2010

Medium rare

Glaser’s fascination with exploded diagrams (this poster for Olivetti, among other things) is applied here to a matter very dear to me: the hamburger. Actually this brings me back to the Sack ‘n’ Save in the suburbs of Dallas, which was the preferred purveyor of hamburger ingredients when I was a child, perhaps because a similar idea was rendered in giant ’70s-oversaturated photographs printed ten feet tall along the hot magenta wall above the butcher section. The illustration above appeared on the second long-player by Philly psych rockers Mandrake Memorial, titled Medium — now a rare find in the bins. Glaser’s influence on the graphic legacy of the hamburger can also be seen on this cover for Time magazine.

December 02, 2010

Milton on Milton

It’s always a pleasure to hear Milton Glaser talk about his work, so here for your viewing delight is a short video of Glaser discussing some of the pieces that appeared in last year’s exhibition, Milton Glaser’s SVA: A Legacy of Graphic Design.

November 19, 2010

It’s friday …

(Click through for a bigger version of this poster, by Milton Glaser.)

September 09, 2010

Turning point

More from George Tscherny: his design on the poster for the U.S. exhibition at the troubled Milan Triennale of 1968. In those days, the event served as a major convergence point for conversation and debate within the design community.

August 27, 2010

Brown bag

More Tony Palladino: a clever concept hiding in plain sight.

August 25, 2010

Color is for anything you want

This deceptively casual promotional piece typifies the whimsy and poignancy found in much of Tony Palladino’s work.

August 19, 2010

Keep it like a secret

In 1961, Ivan Chermayeff designed and illustrated Sandol Stoddard Warburg’s Keep it like a secret (Chermayeff and Warburg had previously collaborated on The Thinking Book in 1960). The charming title, with its childlike connotations, was later appropriated by the band Built to Spill for their 1999 album. Sadly, we only have the jacket, not the book itself, but I did discover another version of the jacket out there.

August 09, 2010

PictureBox Alert

In addition to our posts to the new Container List outpost at Dan Nadel’s PictureBox, Dan himself (whom you probably know as the publisher, art director, editor, curator, and writer extraordinaire, and we know as our No. 1 fan) will be be blogging about his favorite items from our collections. Today at PictureBox, James McMullan’s angelically menacing portrait of Charles Manson gets some love from Dan.

July 21, 2010

Music box

Chermayeff & Geismar’s packaging for these Gramavision CDs brings me back to the CD bins in the (long gone) Tower Records on Broadway and E. 4th Street.

July 08, 2010

McMullan for Caprolan

James McMullan designed and illustrated this piece for Caprolan nylon during his first year at Push Pin; it appeared in the September 7, 1966 issue of Women’s Wear Daily.

June 14, 2010

Ring leaders

If Chermayeff & Geismar could be said to have one particular speciality, it would probably be the knack for distilling complex organizational systems into extremely reduced graphic ideas: their calling card in this respect was the Symbol Signs project. But this poster for Interactive Data Corporation, with its monochrome figuration for a symposium, also falls neatly into the category (along with work for Xerox). Click through for the full page.

June 04, 2010

Subscribe to Push Pin Graphic

The thing that fascinates me most about Push Pin Graphic is how unpredictable they manage to be all the time. Even apart from the contents of each issue, every promotion contains — no matter how generic the thing as a whole may be — some off-kilter element that has a defamiliarizing effect on the whole endeavor. The Cherie Currie-esque figure here has no other reference anywhere on the page, she’s just hanging out in the margin of the tearaway.

May 28, 2010

From Rome to Rio

George Tscherny completed a bogglingly wide range of work standardizing the graphics for Pan Am in the early ’70s, redesigning everything from timetables to stewards’ aprons over the course of two years. These city guides are of a piece with the company’s other projects of that era, recalling both the bold imagery of Chermayeff & Geismar’s posters for the company and Tscherny’s own modular environmental graphics.

May 18, 2010

Run Joey Run

Needless to say, that wedding never took place, not after Julie accidentally took a bullet intended for Joey from Daddy’s gun. Classing up the joint considerably are James McMullan’s expressive illustrations for the album’s cover, which covey a sense of desperation and actual emotional stakes.

May 02, 2010

Performance Spaces

This striking invitation features an image from David Oppenheim’s “Parallel Stress,” in which a figure cups the interior curve of two mounds of earth (in the other, I believe, he hangs in space). The washed-out monochrome palette makes it all blend together, giving the sense of the artist as an organic component of the environment: which aptly reflects this exhibition’s emphasis on the intersection between installation and performance art. Featured in Performance Spaces: a series of printed scores (“songs written for specific birds and athletes”) and the documentation for “Silent Ping Pong” by Bill Beckley, a performance installation by Terry Fox, a confrontational sculpture by Howard Fried, and Dennis Oppenheim’s “Gingerbread Man.”