SVA Archives

February 22, 2014

Words and music

Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar’s playful experiments with type placement and scale for Concert Associates.

February 18, 2014

Another side of the Visual Arts Gallery

Folk art at the Visual Arts Gallery in the early 1970s.

February 16, 2014

Ciba graphics

Chermayeff & Geismar interpreted scientific data for Ciba Pharmaceuticals.

February 16, 2014

Outside the box

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable. – Samuel Johnson

February 12, 2014

Significant figures

Milton Glaser’s menagerie of figures for the School of Visual Arts, 1971.

February 09, 2014

Dim sum

The Nom Wah Tea Parlor, the venerable Chinatown dim sum purveyor that uses Milton Glaser’s illustrations on its menu, reopened in time for the Chinese New Year.

February 07, 2014

Effervescent packaging by Seymour Chwast

A short tour of Seymour Chwast’s designs for beer and soda packaging.

February 03, 2014

Text clean and tight, some tearing

Early in his career, Tony Palladino specialized in book jackets—his style was always restrained, and oscillated between primitive torn-paper graphics and highly simplified visual ideas.

February 01, 2014

Urban Outfitters’ Slant

In the early 1990s, Urban Outfitters fully embraced a retro, anti-consumerist consumerism, snarky and winking – alternative style gone mainstream.

January 28, 2014

Barbizon

George Tscherny’s 1967 company profile for lingerie-maker Barbizon.

January 28, 2014

Record labels

Milton Glaser applies his passion for music to record labels.

January 25, 2014

Milton Glaser’s menus for the World Trade Center

One curious feature about the Glaser collection is its organizational style, which was based on the way the materials were donated by the designer. Subseries G of his Printed Materials contains many of the menus he did for businesses at the World Trade Center.

January 21, 2014

Shaped Paintings

The third exhibition directed by Jeanne Siegel at the Visual Arts Museum riffed on the Guggenheim’s The Shaped Canvas.

January 19, 2014

James McMullan on the grid

James McMullan colors outside the lines of a self-imposed grid.

January 13, 2014

George Tscherny for Herman Miller

George Tscherny developed his style working for Herman Miller in the mid-50s.

January 09, 2014

Up in smoke, part 2

Liggett & Myers’ Designer Packs designed by George Tscherny.

January 08, 2014

Justine & Balthazar

While McMullan’s work from the early 1960s is close in spirit to the evocative illustration of his colleagues Robert Weaver and Jerome Martin, Glaser’s late 1960s take shows a pop/psych style then at its height. The art is very much in keeping with other work that Glaser was doing at the time, with its flowing curvilinear lines and high contrast colors, which also, intentional or not, indicate some churning emotional content.