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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.
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April 26, 2013
Guessing game
A mystery poster from the making of SVA Gold.
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March 31, 2013
The furniture people of Stanley VanDerBeek
Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) was best known as an experimental filmmaker but he was also a gifted painter and sculptor. This undated issue of the Push Pin Graphic features photographs of VanDerBeek’s whimsical creations.
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March 25, 2013
Wonder Magazine, 1962
Wonder was the product of Henry Wolf’s class, Making a Magazine, at the School of Visual Arts. Conceived, designed, and written over the course of the Fall 1961 and Spring 1962 semesters, this one-off children’s magazine communicated with its audience in an exuberantly playful manner that never condescended. And it’s certainly the coolest-looking kids magazine I’ve ever seen. Wolf’s students included William Ingraham, Walter Bernard, Sullivan Ashby, Robert Giusti, Herbert Migdoll, Shirley Glaser, David November, Antonio Macchia, and Henry Markowitz.
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March 06, 2013
The SVA Tribeca gallery, 1980
SVA’s Tribeca Gallery, which housed student shows in 1979 and 1980, was one of the first school-run galleries that showed student work in a competitive art scene. Randy Black appeared in a 1980 show alongside Ilan Averbuch, Rebecca Cuming, Jennifer Macdonald, Stephanie Rudolph and Brian Spaeth. The background on the gallery and the story of a forgotten work by Keith Haring follow.
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March 04, 2013
Talk about the Passion
Milton Glaser and Henry Wolf’s magazine workshop pays tribute to the landmark erotic publication Eros.
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February 01, 2013
Inaugural address
A pair of posters announcing the School of Visual Arts’ new location at 209 E 23rd Street.
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January 20, 2013
The glasses on the cover don’t exist
And yet…
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January 07, 2013
Lucky number 13
A series of talks at SVA in 1971 and 1972 featured a pretty spectacular line-up: Carl Andre, Larry Bell, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. The poster art, by John Sposato, reads as minimalism sent through the Push Pin filter (even though Sposato, who still teaches at SVA today, was, to my knowledge, never employed by the studio), right down to the slowly unfolding plays on depth and perspective.
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January 07, 2013
Bob Gill
Designer and illustrator Bob Gill was one of the earliest faculty members at SVA, joining right around the time George Tscherny taught the school’s first design course.
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February 15, 2012
Phil Hays for SVA
This is a detail from possibly my all-time favorite SVA poster (click through for the whole image). It was illustrated by Phil Hays in the 1960s while he was chairman of SVA’s illustration department. Hays’ later work, especially his portraits of musicians and Hollywood stars, was markedly more hyperrealistic and decadent than this simple three-pane poster of a woman sitting in a chair, smoking. At first it seems something of a strange ad pitch, yet the subject is serene and satisfied and the work is masterly, somehow making the argument for SVA in its inherent quality.
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January 13, 2012
Brushes with history
Another example of paintbrushes (standing in for the artist) combined with another object (here, amid or as the hammers on a typewriter) follows the one we featured last week. The poster this detail is from originally was made to promote a panel discussion between the artists Alice Aycock, Alex Katz, and Lucio Pozzi with critics Lawrence Alloway, Hilton Kramer and moderator Donald Kuspit on the relationship between the artist and critic.
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December 14, 2011
Little black bag
The subtly provocative design is credited to Frank Kirk, which is not a name I’ve seen on any other SVA publications.
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August 17, 2011
Apply today
Another great example of SVA’s forms from the early George Tscherny identity system. Its almost stuffily balanced width is softened a tiny bit by the lowercase “application.” Love the setting of the serif type and the letter-spaced gothic below. We need to get a vitrine for this whole system (see also: 1 and 2).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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March 09, 2010
Sal Jon Bue
Bue also designed this piece for the 1964 World’s Fair and his work was featured in Early/Later, an exhibition at the Whitney in Stamford in 1991.
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By Collection
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SVA Historical Event Recordings
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Gail Anderson Collection
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SVA COVID Collection
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Ed Benguiat Collection
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SVA Publications and Institutional Records
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Ivan Chermayeff Collection
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Ralph Caplan Collection
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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection
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Seymour Chwast Collection
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Stephen Doyle Collection
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Heinz Edelmann Collection
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Richard Wilde Papers
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Roger Ferriter Collection
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Louise Fili Collection
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Cris Gianakos Collection
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Bob Gill Collection
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Milton Glaser Collection
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Keith Godard Collection
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Steven Heller Collection
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David Mazzucchelli Collection
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Ed McCabe Collection
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James McMullan Collection
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Tony Palladino Collection
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Stefan Sagmeister Collection
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Paul Sahre Collection
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Deborah Sussman Collection
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Fred Troller Collection
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George Tscherny Collection
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Henry Wolf Collection