From the Cartoonists and Illustrators School to SVA.

The School of Visual Arts, known as SVA, is an art school in Manhattan, New York. Wikipedia says it was started in 1947 by Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, and that its early students were largely veterans of the Second World War whose tuition was largely paid through the G.I. Bill. AIGA Eye on Design, in an article published on 4 January 2017, also names Silas H. Rhodes as a founder of the school and says the institution opened as the Cartoonist & Illustrators School.

Wikipedia’s article on Rhodes adds detail about how the school came about. It says that after the war Rhodes worked for the Veterans Administration and that he and Hogarth, the illustrator known for the Tarzan comic strip, persuaded the administration to support an art school for returning veterans. It describes the new school as an expansion of Hogarth’s Manhattan Academy of Newspaper Art, and names James Boyle as a third founder alongside Rhodes and Hogarth. Many of the early students, it says, worked during the day and took courses at night, with the aim of entering advertising or publishing.

The school changed its name in the mid-1950s. Wikipedia’s article on the school dates the change to School of Visual Arts to 1956, while its article on Rhodes gives 1955. Eye on Design says the new name came nine years after the opening and was chosen to reflect an expanded curriculum that included classes in the humanities and social sciences as well as the arts. Wikipedia’s article on Rhodes says he helped to shape a curriculum that combined liberal arts courses with traditional studio classes.

The name change was itself announced with a piece of graphic design. According to Eye on Design, a poster designed by George Tscherny in 1956 announced the change of name to School of Visual Arts, using large orange and purple letters to set out the school’s new acronym, S-V-A.

Later dates in the school’s development are recorded by Wikipedia. It says SVA began offering degrees in 1972 and introduced a Master of Fine Arts in painting, drawing and sculpture in 1983. It also says that in 2024 the intersection of 23rd Street and Third Avenue was co-named SVA Way, recognising the school’s presence in the neighbourhood since 1960. The school has buildings in the Gramercy Park area on Manhattan’s east side and in Chelsea on the west side.

Posters made by the people who teach there.

The part of SVA’s identity that reaches the general public is a long-running campaign of subway posters. Eye on Design reported in January 2017 that the campaign began in 1947, when Silas Rhodes started it as the school opened, and that it continues with new posters produced three times a year and hung at subway stops across the city. The magazine described the posters as advertising for the school that also set out to show that advertising need not be ugly, a point made by Francis Di Tomasso, SVA’s gallery director.

The posters are made by the school’s own teachers. Eye on Design said the campaign had grown to include pieces by many artists and designers, all working professionals who teach at SVA, and that they were given a great deal of creative freedom. It quoted Anthony P. Rhodes, SVA’s executive vice president and the campaign’s art director, describing the brief he gave: you are the artist; let us see what you come up with.

Several of the posters in the article are built around a single line of text. Eye on Design opened its article with lines including “When you risk becoming an artist, you risk taking your art seriously.” and “At 35, Paul Gauguin worked in a bank; it is never too late.” Others the article reproduced include “There is no better purpose in life than to start the work you love.” and “If someone says you shouldn’t, ask them who should.”

Some posters have been tied to anniversaries. In 1997, Eye on Design says, the school marked fifty years of the subway posters with an exhibition and a commemorative book, SVA Gold, 50 Years of Creative Graphic Design, with a foreword by Steven Heller, and produced a series of posters on the theme “Art is…Fifty Years”. One of them, “Art is Whatever…” by Milton Glaser, showed four versions of a bowler hat: a photograph of a real hat, the word “hat” inside the word “whatever”, the shadow of a man wearing the hat and a flat graphic shape of a bowler.

Others draw on the subway itself. Eye on Design described a 2011 poster by Louise Fili with the headline “It’s never too late to get where you’re going”, which paid homage to the mosaic craftsmen of the early twentieth century who made the ceramic-tile lettering for New York’s subway signs. Fili told the magazine that the image was built from thousands of digital mosaic tiles, and that a subway poster has to convey an idea clearly and quickly because it is seen from a distance, from a moving train or from the far side of a platform.

Three letters, orange and purple.

Schools and cultural institutions carry identities that work differently from those of consumer brands. Many began with a crest, a seal or a formal Latin motto, the visual language of charters and certificates, and later added or swapped in a plain wordmark that sits more easily on a website, a banner or a tote bag. Others never had a crest at all and built their recognition on a single letter, a typeface or a set of initials.

The building often does as much work as any mark. A façade, an extension or a distinctive staircase becomes the image that photographers, students and visitors repeat, and a new wing can change how an institution is pictured for decades. Posters are a second, older surface: a steady programme of exhibition and event posters, set in a consistent grid or typeface, can define a place more clearly than its logo.

Exhibitions, catalogues, yearbooks, journals and reports extend that system into print, and each title is a chance to test the identity at a new scale. When reading these guides, look at the whole family of surfaces together: the mark, the building, the posters and the publications usually tell one story.

Posters on tour, and an archive of designers.

The posters have also travelled as an exhibition. Eye on Design reported that in 2013, 52 posters were selected from 130 in the school’s archive for Underground Images, a touring exhibition curated by Anthony Rhodes and organised by Mirko Ilić, who teaches graduate illustration at SVA. The opening venue, the magazine said, was the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, Slovenia; it then travelled through Europe, Asia, South America and the United States before ending in 2016 at the A38 exhibition space in Budapest, Hungary. Rhodes said he had tried to include a good mix from all the decades, and the magazine noted that earlier pieces were swapped for newer ones as the show moved on.

The original posters are kept by the school. Eye on Design said the collection is in the care of the SVA Archives under the archivist Beth Kleber, whose lecture “Underground Images: The School of Visual Arts Subway Posters as Public Art” set the posters against trends in illustration, photography and graphic design. Kleber summed up the campaign’s message as the idea that pursuing an artistic life is a risk worth taking.

SVA also holds the papers of designers connected with the school. Wikipedia says its library includes the Milton Glaser Design Study Center and Archives, which holds collections from Chermayeff & Geismar, Seymour Chwast, Heinz Edelmann, Milton Glaser, Steven Heller, Ed McCabe, James McMullan, Tony Palladino, George Tscherny and Henry Wolf, alongside the SVA Archives, a repository for material on the college’s own history.

The 2017 article gives a sense of who shaped the campaign over the decades. Beyond Tscherny, Glaser and Fili, it names Gail Anderson and the illustrator Terry Allen, who produced a series of five typographic posters for the 2009–10 academic year.

For a design guide, the School of Visual Arts shows how an institution can build its public identity out of the work of its own teachers, with a short acronym, a recurring format and a new message several times a year. Compare Parsons School of Design, another New York art and design school, and AIGA, the American professional association for design. For this guide we use orange, purple and black with a heavy grotesque, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep School of Visual Arts’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.