17 minute read
ON (AND ON, AND ON) WITH THE SHOW
75 YEARS OF EXHIBITIONS AT SVA
BY LAWRENCE GIFFIN
and sell their work in a professional setting—“cheek by jowl with established artists and gallerists,” DiTommaso says. Fine Arts students who showed work in this space include Lydia Dona (1980), Rodney Alan Greenblat (1982), Keith Haring (1979), Frank Holliday (1980) and Amy Sillman (1979). The operation relocated to 137 Wooster Street the following year, where it remained until 2004, when it moved into its current, purpose-built home on the 15th floor of the Starrett-Lehigh, at 601 West 26th Street. Consisting of four large exhibition rooms with lofty ceil ings and concrete floors, an office suite, reception area and expansive terrace overlooking the Hudson River and lower Manhattan, the SVA Chelsea Gallery,
make the work, you have to learn how to show it. It stands to reason that on the College’s website, the second link after ‘About SVA’ is ‘Exhibitions.’” The following pages present an overview of the history of exhibitions at the School of Visual Arts.
Championing Student Work
Every art school worth its salt exhibits its students’ work, and by 1950, after moving to its second location, at 245 East 23rd Street, the College had begun hosting annual end-of-year shows to highlight the talent of its classes. This is a tradition that continues today through SVA Shows, a yearly schedule of portfolio as it is now known, shares its address with artists, designers, publications and compa - nies of all types and sizes. (Early neighbors included an upstairs upholstery business, “which made a terrific racket,” DiTommaso says, and the storied champagne house Veuve Clicquot, which co-hosted the gal lery’s opening reception.) In addition to maintaining an off- campus gallery, SVA has helped to pioneer art schools’ participation in fairs—an in -
reviews, screenings, thesis presentations and traditional gallery installations celebrating the achievements of the insti tution’s latest graduates. In the springs of 1976 and 1977, however, SVA took a decisive step in raising the pro - file of its student exhibitions by venturing off-campus—and situating itself in the center of New York’s art world. Rather than host end-of-year shows solely within its walls, the College took over a few blocks creasingly important part of the art-world ecosystem. In 2003, the College hosted a booth at the Affordable Art Fair in New York City, where it continued as an exhibitor
in SoHo to put on a multimedia event: displaying art inside a handful of neighborhood galleries, projecting film works on building exteriors and hosting performances along through the next 10 years. Four years later SVA began to show students’ and recent graduates’ work in Miami during the city’s annual Art Week—the marquee inter - national event, anchored by the Art Basel fair—and it
West Broadway between Houston and Broome Streets. In 1979, SVA opened a gallery in the American Thread Building at 260 West Broadway, in Tribeca, then the heart of the New York art world, enabling students to present continues to do so, most recently as part of the Untitled, Art Miami Beach fair. (The College and several of its indi - vidual academic departments and student organizations have also shown community work at Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair, New York Comic Con, Photoville and the Untitled Art, San Francisco fair, among others.)
he School of Visual Arts has long prided itself on having a cul - ture of restless invention, and its exhibitions program is no excep tion—from its earliest student showcases and the innovative,
T
high-concept shows of the 1960s and ’70s (which drew powerhouse talents from within and without the College community), to the erasing of the boundaries between student and professional work, to the celebration of creative disciplines whose work is rarely seen on gallery walls. Though records from the College’s earliest years are incomplete, it seems that the first exhibition it held was in 1948. The show was of student work, mounted when the institution, then known as the Cartoonists & Illustrators School, was not yet a year old. In two years’ time, C&I presented its first guest-artist exhibition: a selection of paintings by Francis Criss,* a well-regarded artist asso ciated with Precisionism. It would be an understatement to say that things have progressed considerably since then. Today, SVA main - tains a dedicated Galleries operation, which oversees the two primary on-campus exhibition venues—the SVA Flatiron Gallery, at 133/141 West 21st Street, and the SVA Gramercy Gallery, at 209 East 23rd Street—as well as the SVA Chelsea Gallery, an off-campus space in the land marked Starrett-Lehigh Building, located at the western edge of the Chelsea neighborhood. In a typical year, the department manages a calendar of nearly 50 shows of stu dent, alumni and guest-artist work. “Exhibitions are integral to SVA’s mission ‘to educate future generations of artists, designers and creative pro - fessionals,’” says Francis DiTommaso, director of SVA Galleries since 1994. “No matter the degree program, SVA is dedicated to preparing students for professional success. And that means you not only have to learn how to
Undated SVA
PREVIOUS
exhibition reception photo.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT
Milton Glaser poster for “The Landscape” (1966); sculpture by Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, from “The Influentials” (2011); Keith Haring at “8 Artists / 8 Years” (1985), photo by Paula Cort; “The Beat Goes On” (2016), curated by Derrick Adams; “Yasuo Tanaka: 10,001 Drawings” (1992).
75 YEARS OF EXHIBITIONS AT SVA
Jayson
FROM LEFT
Atienza (BFA 1999 Advertising) poses with friends and colleagues Sean Williams, Joe Volpicelli and Joan Wood in front of “Art Headed,” his series of custom- painted helmets, at “The Sports Show” (2015).
75 YEARS OF EXHIBITIONS AT SVA
Scene-Stealing Solos
and placed into four binders on pedestals in an otherwise But wait, there’s more. Alongside its high-concept, high-wattage group exhibi - tions, in the ’60s and ’70s SVA was also home to a wealth
empty gallery. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh has called it “probably the first truly conceptual art installation.” “Concrete Poetry” (1968) was one of the earliest shows of solo shows by many of the era’s preeminent artists. In 1970 guest curator Felice Wender organized the first of Robert Rauschenberg’s five solo outings at SVA—the most of any artist to date—for which the artist debuted the drawings and collages of his “Syn-Tex” series. Sim - ilarly, critic and curator David Whitney brought Andy Warhol’s “Hammers and Sickles” series to the College in 1976—months before the work’s alleged debut at Leo Castelli’s gallery, in 1977. Also in 1976, art historian Susan Ginsburg* presented Sol LeWitt’s “All Combinations of Arcs from Four Corners, Arcs from Four Sides, Straight Lines, Not-Straight Lines and Broken
in the U.S. dedicated to the art form—poetry whose ef - fect and meaning derives from the appearance of the text, rather than the text itself—and featured Augusto de Cam - pos, Emmett Williams, Dick Higgins, Dieter Roth and Ian Hamilton Finlay, alongside text-heavy artists Carl Andre* and Dan Graham.* And the list goes on. Glaser’s thematic shows set the stage for similarly ambitious exhibitions presented by faculty and guest curators. Lucy Lippard’s* “Groups” (1969) included art - ists such as Sylvia Mangold,* Adrian Piper (1969 Fine Arts) and Lawrence Weiner alongside Lines. White Lines on a Black Wall.” And in 1971, critic Douglas Crimp,* then early in his career, put together Agnes Martin’s first-ever noncommercial solo exhibition— which, as it included paintings of Martin’s from the 1960s, was also arguably her first retrospective. Diane Waldman, a curator at the Guggen - heim from 1965 to 1996, was responsible for several shows at SVA of important art -
Lippard’s SVA students. Each produced a series according to strict guidelines: pho tograph the same group of people once a day for a week; write a detailed description of each image; and hang the pictures and descriptions in whatever order you want. “Formative Years” (1975), curated by Swiss painter Grégoire Müller, presented early work by artists—Lee Krasner, Jas - per Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Rothko ists from 1971 to 1987: Roy Lichtenstein,
and more—before they’d developed their Cy Twombly, Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, Robert Motherwell and David Hockney, among others. (She also curated a handful of star-studded group shows featuring drawing, photography and sculptors’ drawings.)
Showcasing Commercial Arts
Just as the academic departments at SVA encompass a range of creative disciplines, the College’s exhibitions pro - gram has gone beyond fine art to encompass advertising, commercial illustration, comics, design, fashion photog raphy and photojournalism, and more. The 1950s saw exhibitions of art commissioned by Ban - , the last of which was known at that time for hiring graphic artists associated with the school, like Seymour Chwast,* LeWitt and Hesse—along with many solo shows of illustrators and designers, including industry legend Bob Gill,* who died last November.
and Seventeen tam Books, Ladies’ Home Journal
New York Times review of the show distinct styles; a commented that “the Visual Arts Gallery does more with almost nothing than many a well-budgeted museum.” More recently, SVA Galleries guest curators have in founder and curator Phong Bui,* Brooklyn Rail cluded whose “Intimacy in Discourse: Reasonable/Unreason - able Sized Paintings” (2015) explored how a painting’s dimensions influence its effect; artist Derrick Adams, whose “The Beat Goes On” (2016) presented multimedia, music-inspired art; and political cartoonist Steve Brod - ner,* whose “Art as Witness: Political Graphics 2016 – 18” (2018) gathered animations and cartoons from the 2016 election and early years of the Trump administration.
Innovative Group Exhibitions
SVA moved to its current flagship building at 209 East 23rd Street in 1960 and established a dedicated gallery office and ground-floor exhibition space, known first as the Visual Arts Gallery, then as the Visual Arts Museum, and today as the SVA Gramercy Gallery. It was there that the first gallery coordinator, painter Dorothy Koppelman,* put together the first shows to in - clude work from artists not previously affiliated with SVA, “The Figure: Then and Now” (1961) and “Abstraction: A Selection” (1962). These included work by such estab - lished and mid-career painters as Pat Adams, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Leon Golub,* Alex Katz,* Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel,* Fairfield Porter* and Larry Rivers. But it was in 1964, when Shirley Glaser took over the co ordinator position, that the College’s gallery began to gain a reputation for being, in the words of the New York Her ald, “one of the liveliest exhibition halls in town.” Glaser’s approach was to treat the idea of an exhibition as an con ceptual artwork of its own, organizing them around novel, sometimes off-kilter themes. She was also prolific, pre senting nearly 40 shows over the course of her tenure, for an average of one every three weeks during the academic year. Many featured eye-catching posters and promotional materials designed by the late designer, faculty member and longtime acting chair of the College’s Board Milton Glaser, Shirley’s husband. “Art Without Design” (1965), co-curated with Milton Glaser, consisted solely of discarded printer trial sheets; magazine noted the sheets’ “striking relationship to Print much of the art that is being produced today.” “65 self-portraits” (1965)—a reference to the year the show was held, rather than the number of pieces on dis - play—collected self-portraits by Jane Freilicher, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Allan D’Arcangelo,* Alex Katz* and others, at a time when such works were out of fashion. It drew enough public attention to warrant an extended run . and a four-page spread in Esquire “Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art” (1966), on which Glaser collaborated with artist Mel Bochner,* featured receipts, notes, sketches and other scraps of paper from artists such as Dan Flavin, Dan Graham,* Eva Hesse,* Sol LeWitt (1954 Illustration),* Donald Judd, and composers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, all collected, copied
Rand” (1988); “Master Series: Massimo Vignelli” (1991); reception for “The Landscape” (1966); Glaser poster for “NOW” (1965), an exhibition of photographs by civil-rights organizers; Duane Michals works on his 2000 “Masters Series” show.
“Ink Plots:
PREVIOUS
The Tradition of the Graphic Novel at SVA” (2010).
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT
Undated SVA exhibition photo by Ed Wallace; Milton Glaser poster for “Concrete Poetry” (1968); Paul and Marion Rand at “Masters Series: Paul
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
“We Tell Stories: 30 Years of MFA Illustration as Visual Essay at SVA” (2014); photos of SVA co-founder Silas Rhodes (left), Visual Arts Gallery Director Shirley Glaser and two unidentified men at designer Jan Lenica’s 1967 SVA show; 1976 exhibition poster with art by Ron Di Scenza (BFA 1976 Fine Arts); “Big Nudes” (1966); Milton Glaser poster for “Big Nudes”; lightbox artwork by Steve DeFrank (MFA 1990 Fine Arts), from “Beginning Here: 101 Ways” (2004).
to its yearly After School Special Alumni Film and Animation Festival, which takes place at the theater in late summer). “Un derground Images,” a traveling exhibition established and curated by EVP Rhodes and featuring a rotating selection of SVA posters created for display in New York City’s subway system, has been installed in more than 30 countries around the world.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
“Frank Stella: The
LEFT
Series Within a Series” (1978) and “Andy Warhol: Drawings” (1976), photos by Dan Dragan; SVA booth at 2013 Affordable Art Fair; “Working on a Building” (2002), student show at SVA’s former gallery on Wooster Street.
designers, filmmakers and more to the world of athletics. These shows and many others have continued to build the case for the alumni community’s vast and varied influence on visual culture. Further back and smaller in scope but no less notable is then BFA Fine Arts Chair Jeanne Siegel’s exhibition “8 Art - ists / 8 Years” (1985), featuring program Just as surely, there will be much to write about on this topic in the years ahead. As SVA con - tinues to grow and adapt along with the art and design fields it serves, it will continue to reimagine its exhibitions program accordingly. Just to take one example, while the pandemic’s demand for exclusively virtual exhibition spaces may have ebbed, the digital presentation of art
alumni Lydia Dona, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf (1981), Barry Bridgwod (1983), Jedd Garet (1977), Jane Swavely (1980), James Wang (1983), and Tod Wizon (1976). All studied in Siegel’s department between 1975 and 1983; all at the time had at least one solo show to their name. (Haring, the exhibition’s press release noted, had already had 16.) remains more important than ever. Last spring, BFA Car - tooning, BFA Illustration and BFA Interior Design held online-only student shows and MA/MAT Art Education
The Future of Show Business
There is much, much more that could be covered here.
Most significantly, however, in 1988 SVA co-founder Si - las H. Rhodes established the Masters Series Award and Exhibition, an annual event honoring visual communicators whose work has had significant cultural impact but whose names may not be known to the general public. The inaugural honoree, designer Paul Rand, created the logos for IBM, UPS and Westinghouse, among other organizations; subsequent recipients include environmental graphic designer Deborah Sussman (1995); photographers Mary Ellen Mark (1996) and Duane Michals (2000); graphic designer and visual humorist Shigeo Fukuda (2001); and New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast (2018). The 2022 honoree, international photojournalist Lynsey Addario, has won a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Fellowship for her work, and spent much of the past year on assignment in Ukraine for
. The New York Times
Homecomings
Alumni work has been shown at SVA roughly since the Col - lege had been around long enough to have alumni, but it wasn’t held online-only thesis presentations, while BFA Anima tion, MFA Computer Arts and MFA Interaction Design offered live streams of their in-person end-of-year events. No matter the prevailing trends or emerging technol ogies, SVA exhibitions will always hold the promise of something rare or never-before-seen: an illuminating jux - taposition of works, a look inside the creative process and development of a pathbreaking talent, or the chance to see the early promise of the next photographer, comics artist, sculptor or filmmaker who will take the world by storm. “Among art schools, I believe that SVA’s commitment to professional-level exhibitions—for the benefit of our stu - dents, our alumni, the industry and the public at large—is
The MA Curatorial Practice program—in addition to occupying a campus space with movable walls, so that the room can be reconfigured to suit an exhibition’s needs— has for many years presented its year-end shows in a former Pfizer factory building in Brooklyn,
until, appropriately enough, “Beginning Here: 101 Ways” critic Jerry Saltz* and Rachel New York (2004), curated by Gugelberger, then the associate director of SVA Galleries, that large-scale alumni invitationals began to frequently headline the College’s exhibition calendar. (“Beginning located amid the artist-thronged neighbor hoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick. (MFA Fine Arts, too, has presented year-end work in Brooklyn.) The SVA office in Seoul, established to support the College’s growing Korean community, presents work by local alumni. In 2014, Art History and BFA Visual & Critical Studies Chair Tom Huhn initi
Here” was also the inaugural fall exhibition of the SVA Chelsea Gallery.) “Inkplots: The Tradition of the Graphic Novel at SVA” (2010) curated by the late MFA Illus - tration as Visual Essay Chair Marshall Arisman (see page 56) and then BFA Cartooning and BFA Illustration Chair Thomas Woodruff, covered the evolution of storytelling art over several second to none,” DiTommaso says. “From the earliest days, [SVA founder] Silas Rhodes considered exhibitions a critically important component of the College’s mission to participate actively in the art community. That mission has only expanded over the decades.” ◆ is the assistant archivist at the
LAWRENCE GIFFIN
School of Visual Arts. Images courtesy the SVA Archives and SVA Galleries.
ated the transformation of an underutilized ground-floor space in the College’s building at 133/141 West 21st Street; now known as the SVA Flat iron Project Space and featuring a large, street-facing window, it is home to multimedia exhibitions of stu dent and guest artist work throughout the year. In 2016 the SVA Theatre established its annual SVA Premieres screening of select student films, animations and mo tion graphics projects in Los Angeles (this in addition
decades, back to the Cartoonists & Illustrators School days, with contributions from faculty and graduates alike. “The Influentials” (2011), co-organized by former MoMA PS1 curator Amy Smith-Stewart,* paired work by distinguished women alumni with work by a cited influence—Katherine Bernhardt (MFA 2000 Fine Arts) showed alongside Terra Fuller, Michelle Lopez (MFA 1994 Fine Arts)* with Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt,* Phoebe Wash burn (MFA 2002 Fine Arts) with her grandmother Phebe Washburn, and on. “The Sports Show” (2015), conceived by SVA Executive Vice President Anthony P. Rhodes and curated by sports branding professional Todd Radom (BFA 1986 Me - dia Arts) and Alumni Affairs and Development Director Jane Nuzzo, celebrated the often-unsung contributions of graphic
0.325 in
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP
“Masters Series: Steven Heller” (2007); Cris Gianakos (1955 Fine Arts) poster for “Groups” (1969); “The Influentials” (2011); Mel Bochner at “Working drawings” (1966); poster for “Eva Hesse” (1971); Roz Chast and SVA President David Rhodes at the award ceremony for “Masters Series: Roz Chast” (2018).
