Seymour Chwast’s characteristic contour line and flat pastel coloration appears on the packaging of this short-lived late-80s Kosher ice cream, for which his Push Pin Studios also contributed the logo.
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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.
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One regular advertiser in the Push Pin Graphic was Metropolitan Printing.
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Seymour Chwast’s intricate composition of his illustrations.
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Chwast’s can for Diet Pepsi for the Christmas season integrated their 1986-1991 logo into Santa’s spectacles. As you can see in this photo, the rims of the glasses were left unpainted shiny aluminum to highlight the logo—the background behind Santa was also a checkerboard of white and silver. (Click through for full frame.)
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Seymour Chwast’s series of irrational fears for Strathmore Paper.
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And now, the companion piece to the Pushpin beers post. “Any port in a storm.”
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A short tour of Seymour Chwast’s designs for beer and soda packaging.
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In the early 1980s, Push Pin Studios produced a line of candies under the name “Pushpinoff Sweets.”
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In the mid-80s Seymour Chwast was approached by Georg Kovacs, Inc. to experiment with furniture in the Pushpin style.
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We recently received a wonderful donation from illustrator and designer Seymour Chwast. He was a founding partner of Push Pin Studios in 1954, along with Milton Glaser, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins. The studio’s name was changed to the Pushpin Group in 1985 and Chwast remains as its director. Here’s a sampling of the 80 posters we received; future posts will highlight original artwork and other printed materials that offer a comprehensive view of Chwast’s influential career.
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Some ephemeral points of comparison between the work of Seymour Chwast and Andy Warhol.
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In 1995, the Cooper Union celebrated the 40th anniversary of Pushpin Studios with an exhibition and special sale of drawings and paintings by the three founders, pictured above: Seymour Chwast, Edward Sorel, and Milton Glaser; along with works by John Alcorn, Sam Antupit, Michael Aron, Vincent Ceci, Paul Davis, George Leavitt, Tim Lewis, Jim McMullan, Reynold Ruffins, Jerold Smokler, Richard Mantel, “and others.” This reminded me of another similar device that captured a group that is also heavily represented by the Archive.
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From the Push Pin Slide Collection: what appears to be a study for an alphabet based on the 1971 PBS identity designed by Lubalin Studio.
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Another obscure, undated bit of imagery from the Pushpin slide library. Seymour Chwast’s contribution to the legacy of Roth-Händle cigarettes, probably for Frankfurter Allgemein Zeitung. He’s in good company: Robert Motherwell did a collage of the same, and, more pertinent certainly, many famous posters for the brand were designed by the great early twentieth-century designer Herbert Leupin. Note: despite the preponderance of smoking-related imagery we’ve been posting lately, Container List does not condone the practice, which doesn’t make you look cool unless you’re already Humphrey Bogart. Kids, it’s just NOT archival.
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Bob Dylan’s brief relationship with Joan Baez was exhaustively documented, but we get interested when that affair highlighted the work of Push Pin Studios. In 1964, Dylan and Baez were photographed at Newark Airport in front of Seymour Chwast’s poster for Booth’s Gin: an incongruous, but not surprising, image of two icons flanking a countercultural message from a corporate advertiser.
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Here in New York we’re struggling through a heatwave. Perhaps a good course of action for those lucky enough to reside in air-conditioned high-rise Soho lofts is to keep it cool by lounging about with bright furniture, like the sporty cat in this illustration by Seymour Chwast (undated, but probably for the Frankfurter Allgemein Zeitung).
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SVA Historical Event Recordings
Gail Anderson Collection
SVA COVID Collection
Ed Benguiat Collection
SVA Publications and Institutional Records
Ivan Chermayeff Collection
Chermayeff & Geismar Collection
Seymour Chwast Collection
Stephen Doyle Collection
Heinz Edelmann Collection
Roger Ferriter Collection
Louise Fili Collection
Cris Gianakos Collection
Milton Glaser Collection
Keith Godard Collection
Steven Heller Collection
David Mazzucchelli Collection
Ed McCabe Collection
James McMullan Collection
Tony Palladino Collection
Stefan Sagmeister Collection
Paul Sahre Collection
Deborah Sussman Collection
Fred Troller Collection
George Tscherny Collection
Henry Wolf Collection