School of Visual Arts Collection. Detail of poster illustrated by Phil Hays and designed by Ivan Chermayeff, 1960s.

SVA’s early subway posters helped raise the school to a new plane of artistic and intellectual pursuits.

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We’ve just received materials from the 2005 exhibition The Design of Dissent donated by designer Mirko Ilić, who, along with Milton Glaser, collected the materials and created a book on the project.

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School of Visual Arts Collection: Poster for Robert Weaver: Retrospective 1956-1977.

Pioneering illustrator Robert Weaver was a major figure at SVA beginning in 1950s.

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Milton Glaser Collection: The Art of Seeing announcement, 1962.

A symposium of “provocative visual material” inspired Milton Glaser to come up with some of his own.

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School of Visual Arts Collection: Annual Art Scholarships by Sal Jon Bue, 1959.

I recently came across this lovely poster Sal Jon Bue designed for SVA in 1959. My research on the unfamiliar (to me) Bue didn’t turn up much, but I did learn he taught courses on typographic and advertising design at SVA in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at which time he encouraged his student Paul Davis to submit his work to Push Pin Studios. You can see similarities in style to the work of his fellow SVA faculty member, Bob Gill. Bue passed away in 2001.

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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School of Visual Arts Collection: Passion cover, 1970.

Milton Glaser and Henry Wolf’s magazine workshop pays tribute to the landmark erotic publication Eros.

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And yet…

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School of Visual Arts Collection, Bob Gill self-promotional pamphlet, c. 1959.

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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School of Visual Arts Exhibitions: Sketch for Groups exhibition poster, November 11 – December 3, 1969.

We love our LeWitt here at Container List, and we recently found some very early exhibition announcements for his work at SVA and other galleries.

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This detail for a 1956 poster for the Cartoonist & Illustrators School by George Tscherny. Rebranded as the School of Visual Arts later that year, the designer had a long and fruitful relationship with the institution.

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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 68 Folder 14. Visual Arts Gallery Announcement: The Private Press, 1966.

A retrospective of Milton’s Glaser’s design work for SVA opens today at SVA’s Visual Arts Gallery (601 W. 26th Street, NYC).

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SVA Collection RG 15: Exhibitions, 1966

We just stumbled across a long-lost poster for the seminal conceptual art exhibit, Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art (Visual Arts Gallery, December 2 – December 23, 1966). Initially asked by gallery director Shirley Glaser to organize a Christmas show of drawings, Mel Bochner collected notes, sketches, and diagrams from artist friends (as well as mathematicians, biologists, choreographers, and engineers). He ultimately photocopied the working drawings (using SVA’s brand new Xerox machine), placed them into four identical binders, and mounted them on pedestals in the gallery.

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We recently received a wonderful donation from James McMullan, and while I was looking for a few things to feature in a sneak peek, I came across this illustration he did for Push Pin of Long Island as a potato.

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SVA Collection: RG 5.2 Continuing Education, course announcements

During the 1960s, SVA published a series of course announcements advertising the practical aspects of its evening classes. The text was often dry but the graphics were playful and eye-catching. Here, having some fun with type, are Ivan Chermayeff and Tony Palladino. Chermayeff and Bob Gill are after the jump.

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Detail from Sol Lewitt, All Combinations of Arcs from Four Corners, Arcs from Four Sides, Straight Lines, Not-Straight Lines and Broken Lines (1976).

In March 1976, Sol Lewitt had his first solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Museum (209 E. 23rd Street). The work exhibited wasn’t the piece itself, but rather the result of instructions he gave to third parties: they assembled a large graphic combination drawn from a vocabulary of white-on-black linear figures provided by the artist. Instead of hiring technicians or specialists to screen the shapes in a particular order, the artist made explicit that the idea or set of instructions for the art was itself the art, rather than the artifact it produced. He continued the process across several similar pieces, some of which used the same graphic forms — one, Wall Drawing #260, was the subject of a recent focus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

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SVA Tribeca Gallery Show No. 4, April 3-14, 1979. Works by Gary Sherman and Julie Cohen.

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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Milton Glaser Collection: Box 112, Folder 24, Push Pin Graphic (undated)

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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SVA RG 14.9.1 Media Arts — 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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Randy Black, installation at the Tribeca Gallery of the School of Visual Arts.

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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Students, alumni and faculty of SVA attended Tony Palladino’s lecture on his work, art and design. (You can see some of his work in the Archives’ Palladino gallery.)

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