A mystery poster from the making of SVA Gold.

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A pair of posters announcing the School of Visual Arts’ new location at 209 E 23rd Street.

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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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The tension between the accidental and the controlled is almost always present in the work of George Tscherny.

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Milton Glaser got minimal for SVA’s 40th Anniversary logo.

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Tony Palladino created this indelible image for an SVA poster in 1989.

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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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Detail from SVA Collection, Events: Fine Arts Department. ‘Artist and Critic: The Nature of the Relationship’ (March 1979).

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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School of Visual Arts Collection. “The School of Visual Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Three Distinguished Women to the Faculty” poster, 1962.

In 1962, SVA appointed Dorothy Koppelman, Alice Neel, and May Stevens to the Fine Arts faculty. Neel’s somewhat opaque description of her course, “Painting People”, still manages to evoke her manner of expressiveness and psychological perception.

Person and chair in room, also space, are structural – only the person inside his structure has other unique qualities which affect the other parts of the painting…sometimes the person gives off the structure around him. Person and background are one in best paintings. Person is psychological reflection of his era.

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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In 1964, the Sanders Printing Corporation invited SVA’s graduating class to produce its periodic promotional publication, Folio.

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SVA Exhibitions 1285: And The Livin’ Is Easy: A Summer Show. 1-29 June 1986.

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).

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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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Cy Twombly was the subject of two solo exhibitions at SVA, in 1973 and 1977, just before his idiosyncratic work found new favor with the rising generation of neo-Expressionists.

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The BFA Fine Arts department has long shown film or video art in the SVA Amphitheatre. These rough posters, spanning three decades, announce screenings of milestone works.

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I especially like identity systems when they are applied to things that might seem outside of the purview of corporate promotions. So with this SVA check designed by George Tscherny, circa 1956.

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Allan Kaprow, innovator of the Happening, the Environment, and the Activity, brought his expanded view of art to post-modernism.

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SVA’s subway posters established the school’s graphic presence by using abstract concepts to convey a deeply pragmatic message.

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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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One of George Tscherny’s graphic hobbyhorses was the jumbled appearance of type on an undulating surface.

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Fashion illustration was a popular pursuit at SVA in the 1960s.

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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. The film is also available for download from iTunes U.

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School of Visual Arts Collection: SVA Department of Illustration Exhibition, April 7-28, 1961: Phil Hays

A 1961 exhibition of the work of the SVA Department of Illustration is a who’s who of the practitioners of the new expressive and painterly illustration of the time.

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School of Visual Arts Collection: Detail from Blechman and Slackman course announcement, 1960s.

Squigglyman and Captain Cross-Hatch will be back right after they foil Dr. Ugg, who is about to detonate his diabolical Gloomsday Device.

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Henry Wolf Collection Box 7 Folder 73: Course announcement for the School of Visual Arts, c. 1964.

Henry Wolf created this School of Visual Arts course announcement for his friend, photographer Melvin Sokolsky.

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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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