Blog Page 2 of 3 | SVA Archives

May 27, 2014

Dirty talks

Panel discussions and talks sponsored by the Fine Arts Department in the heady conceptual late-70s and early-80s often adopted a DIY or punk aesthetic in their announcements.

April 19, 2014

First Look: Deborah Sussman

Next in our Design and Illustration Study Collection is the work of environmental design pioneer Deborah Sussman.

April 14, 2014

The newest culinary celebrity

Chermayeff & Geismar for the State of Maine Cheese Company.

January 28, 2014

Record labels

Milton Glaser applies his passion for music to record labels.

December 22, 2013

Candies by Seymour Chwast

In the early 1980s, Push Pin Studios produced a line of candies under the name “Pushpinoff Sweets.”

October 29, 2013

Heinz Edelmann for Klett-Cotta

Heinz Edelmann worked extensively with the Klett-Cotta press over the course of his career: we’ve collected some of his best jackets.

October 15, 2013

Exploding coffee table

While we’re on the subject of the Memphis Group, better take cover; that table’s gonna blow.

October 12, 2013

Chairs by Chwast

In the mid-80s Seymour Chwast was approached by Georg Kovacs, Inc. to experiment with furniture in the Pushpin style.

October 06, 2013

A Grand Union

In the mid-1970s, Milton Glaser was approached by Sir James Goldsmith to take on a dramatic redesign of the supermarket chain Grand Union.

September 29, 2013

First Look: James McMullan

This summer we received a great donation from illustrator, poster designer and long-time SVA faculty member James McMullan.

September 16, 2013

One of these mornings

Labor Day has come and gone, and the Autumn equinox is only a week away; as a send-off to summer, I dug up this charming 1984 promotion for a show at the Visual Arts Museum, featuring a motley assortment of artists—just about everybody under the sun: Fernando Botero, Red Grooms, Alex Katz, Richard Prince, and plenty of others (click through for a list).

September 09, 2013

Edelmann’s design on a dime

While preparing for a class visit a couple of weeks ago, I rediscovered these gorgeous posters Heinz Edelmann did for Theater der Welt (Theater of the World) in 1981.

August 12, 2013

Concrete Poetry

Milton Glaser tips his hat to French poet, playwright, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire.

August 06, 2013

Serial production

For large patches of his later career Heinz Edelmann focused on quickly producing posters for arts events and series productions: these typically made use of a fairly regularized typographic template for information, and wild, allusive but enigmatic illustrations. For one season in the mid-1980s, he worked with the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus theater, playing off the plays’ angsty plotlines with evocatively deformed bodies.

July 22, 2013

Layer cake

One of the central features of the Push Pin generation of designers — mainly Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser — was a continued inspiration from, and reliance upon, physically layered compositions (using e.g., cello-tak) and photographic compositing.

June 15, 2013

How does one become an Emigre?

Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko’s Emigre defined the look of new media that emerged with the proliferation of the personal computer.

June 07, 2013

Borges by McMullan

James McMullan’s watercolor book jackets capture the spirit of Borges.

May 19, 2013

Portrait of a gallery

Earlier, we highlighted a look at the SVA Tribeca Gallery, which was open from 1979-1980 in the American Thread Building on West Broadway and featured SVA student work in a professional gallery setting. The complete history of this seminal gallery is now available on our web site (designed by Archives staff member Zachary Sachs). Some featured artworks follow.

April 28, 2013

Alan Fletcher’s “Feedback”

Among the ephemera in the Henry Wolf Collection are five early editions of Pentagram’s Feedback — guidebooks for globetrotting designers. Excerpts from David Hockney, Olivier Morgue and Bob Gill follow.