SVA Archives

February 16, 2016

Delpire

Robert Delpire and Push Pin Studio’s mutual admiration resulted in exhibitions in both New York and Paris.

October 28, 2015

Identified Flying Objects

Milton Glaser’s surreal landscapes for Hangar Design Group.

August 04, 2015

65 Self-Portraits

65 Self-Portraits is one of the best documented of the remarkable series of exhibitions organized by Shirley Glaser while she was director of SVA’s Visual Arts Gallery, 1964-1969.

July 21, 2015

Milton Glaser’s cover for Aaron Lightman’s self-titled LP

This amazing LP from 1969 is one of the most beautiful hidden gems in the field of pop arranged singer-songwriters. Originally issued on Poppy Records, home of psych heads The Mandrake Memorial among others, Lightman’s LP deserves to be discovered by all the fans of the soft rock, orchestra arranged sounds. Think of an American reply to the early works of Duncan Browne, Bill Fay, Nick Garrie or even Donovan at his most popsike recordings. Fans of the early Bee Gees will also enjoy this LP! Credit for the arrangements and production goes to the great Ron Frangipane and David Christopher, who is also credited as a co-writer of the albums songs. The album came housed in a beautiful Milton Glaser sleeve (Glaser was the main designer at Poppy at that time) which the Wah Wah reissue respects, and featured an insert with the lyrics which is also reproduced on our reissue. Housed in quality sleeves and pressed in 180 gram thick black vinyl for the delight of the most discriminating audiophiles. Limited to 500 copies!

November 13, 2014

Skeleton key

Forever potent and still open to interpretation despite its ubiquity, the skeleton has surfaced many times in the early work of Milton Glaser.

October 21, 2014

Chinese Grocery

Really a sister project of Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder’s Underground Gourmet column for New York magazine, Glaser’s “Chinese Grocery” poster sought to guide the uninitiated through a Chinatown market, in this case the no longer extant United Supermarket at 84 Mulberry Street.

August 29, 2014

Story arc

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

August 17, 2014

Type cast

Some type-based design from Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast.

August 01, 2014

All together now

Shades of Yellow Submarine in Gian Carlo Menotti’s sci-fi opera for children Help, Help, The Globolinks!

February 12, 2014

Significant figures

Milton Glaser’s menagerie of figures for the School of Visual Arts, 1971.

January 08, 2014

Justine & Balthazar

While McMullan’s work from the early 1960s is close in spirit to the evocative illustration of his colleagues Robert Weaver and Jerome Martin, Glaser’s late 1960s take shows a pop/psych style then at its height. The art is very much in keeping with other work that Glaser was doing at the time, with its flowing curvilinear lines and high contrast colors, which also, intentional or not, indicate some churning emotional content.

December 13, 2013

Life Underground

Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder ate their way through NYC so you didn’t have to.

November 20, 2013

Working drawings

Milton Glaser’s sketch for the Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art poster became a part of the artwork.

October 28, 2013

A brief tour of Milton Glaser’s typography

Glaser’s typefaces combine Pushpin-era Deco motifs with conventions adapted from hand-painted signs, but share a tendency to imbue generic letterforms with geometric dimension.

October 21, 2013

Colorvision!

In what essentially looks like a lost issue of the Push Pin Graphic, Colorvision (“an entirely new concept of color in clothing!”) describes the magic of a Blendescent.

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 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 21, 2013

Go ask Alice

In 1967, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and James McMullan produced psychedelic “travel” posters for an issue of The Push Pin Graphic.

August 31, 2013

Milton Glaser’s SVA: A Legacy of Graphic Design

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

August 24, 2013

Department of the newly uncovered

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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