SVA Archives

January 06, 2015

Welcome back—and to 2015

Students will return to SVA next Monday but we’re back and the archives are reopened already. Here’s Seymour Chwast’s cover design for Time‘s promotional calendar for the academic year 1982–1983.

December 20, 2014

Saks Fifth Avenue’s Folio

Henry Wolf’s work for Saks hearkened back to his days at Harper’s Bazaar and Show.

December 16, 2014

Lost and found

Newly unearthed SVA exhibition posters (1969-1970) from Cris Gianakos.

December 16, 2014

A great one from Tony Palladino, a cleaned-up and stripped-down version of the tear-off fliers that used to proliferate to such an extent that they almost became invisible. This Christmas card both grabs your attention and evokes nostalgia.

December 11, 2014

Christmas mail bag

Steven Heller collected more than 250 Christmas cards from artists for a 1980s book project. Many of the cards are hand-drawn or painted, but even the reproductions are playful and highly personal.

December 10, 2014

Portraits of Pnin

Several incarnations of Vladimir Nabokov’s most lovable protagonist, Timofey Pavlovich Pnin.

December 04, 2014

Milton Glaser for 7 Up

Milton Glaser’s finely detailed sketches for a 7 Up advertising campaign.

November 24, 2014

Pop pourri, part 2

Reader Don O’Hara sent us a few additional iterations of the Jem “Classic Series” we featured last week.

November 19, 2014

Pop pourri

Milton Glaser was hired by Deluxe Communications Corporation/Jem to design a set of LP sleeves for oldies releases they called The Classic Series.

November 16, 2014

C&G for Howard Wise Gallery

Chermayeff & Geismar designed a series of exhibition posters for the Howard Wise Gallery in the 1960s, highlighting the artists’ works. Wise exhibited abstract expressionists including Milton Resnick and Edward Dugmore, and later specialized in kinetic art and light sculputure.

November 13, 2014

Skeleton key

Forever potent and still open to interpretation despite its ubiquity, the skeleton has surfaced many times in the early work of Milton Glaser.

November 05, 2014

Sample clearance

Another chapter in our series of posts on George Tscherny’s work for Pan Am.

October 25, 2014

Fed up with mediocrity

In 1964, the Sanders Printing Corporation invited SVA’s graduating class to produce its periodic promotional publication, Folio.

October 24, 2014

Against the grain

These exhibition catalogs and announcements for the Museum of Contemporary Crafts were created just a year after the museum’s founding in 1956.

October 21, 2014

Chinese Grocery

Really a sister project of Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder’s Underground Gourmet column for New York magazine, Glaser’s “Chinese Grocery” poster sought to guide the uninitiated through a Chinatown market, in this case the no longer extant United Supermarket at 84 Mulberry Street.

October 12, 2014

Politics in print, by Henry Wolf

Henry Wolf took a variety of approaches to dramatizing the American political process in his magazine design.

October 09, 2014

Accidents will happen

The tension between the accidental and the controlled is almost always present in the work of George Tscherny.

October 08, 2014

Brilliant mistake

The 1964 course announcement for Henry Wolf’s and Melvin Sokolsky’s photography course at SVA manages to be both instructive and artful, assembling outtakes of the instructors’ portraits in a way that elevates them.