Poster House
119 West 23rd Street
New York City
Current Exhibits
Poster art is so common that many of us never bother to think of it as art in a conventional way. Posters are something we slap up on our dorm rooms and our first apartments because we can’t afford “real” art. When we get a bit more flush, most of them come down in favor of paintings, laser prints, and other forms of so-called “fine art.” If we have posters at all, they tend to be from museum exhibits or things we keep for sentimental reasons (like concerts and our favorite musicians).
We do an injustice to graphic designers and illustrators when we think of them as purely commercial or decorative. Poster House in New York City is dedicated to making us see posters seriously. How? By hanging them on museum walls like the real art they are–complete with curator labels. If you protest that they are endlessly reproducible, you’re right, but if you see the same image a lot it means that the artist was successful in creating a striking design.
Poster House has changing exhibits dedicated to posters. Its only downside is exactly that of the posters you hung on your own walls. That is, it’s hard to find a good space that doesn’t have a ton of glare bouncing off the glass. (Non-reflective glass is a near oxymoron!) This explains why some of my examples below are not shot straight on. I also tried to get rid of reflections and glare, but there’s only so much I could do without spending all day on a few images!
The big exhibit is called Wonder City of the World: New York City Travel Posters (through September 8, 2024). Maybe you just think of the Big Apple as rotten to is core or just a typical American city that happens to be bigger than any other. Yet it has long held allure for foreigners. It has forests of skyscrapers, not just one or two, and it’s the probably the most diverse urban settlement since the days of the 3rd century Roman Empire–a veritable United Nations of humanity.
It holds that distinction for many Americans as well. When I was a child I lived five hours away, but it might as well have been Mars to my Planet Earth. Railroads advertised trips there (not that my town had passenger rail) and, if you think about it, it’s one of the few cities that explains itself. If you say, “I’m going to New York City this weekend,” the automatic response is, “Oh! What are you going to do there?” Tell someone you’re heading to Cincinnati or Boise and they’ll ask, “Why?!!”
We noticed that TWA had some of the most intriguing designs. Trans World Airlines went out of business in 2001, so maybe it should have put more emphasis on its planes but for decades TWA was the king of the runway and the sketch board.
Whether you think about it or not, movie posters have long been a staple for luring patrons to buy theater tickets. Have you ever found yourself wondering about a movie because its poster grabbed your eye? A second exhibit is The Anatomy of a Movie Poster: The Work of Dawn Baille (through November 3, 2024). She’s one of the big (and well-paid!) names in Hollywood because producers and directors are aware that she has a knack for attention-grabbing poster art. I’ll bet almost everyone has seen the examples below. I loved some of the art even when I hated the movies attached to them! I can also say without fear that were I a teen again, I’d definitely have Catherine Zeta-Jones on my wall!
Another effective exhibit was We Tried to Warn You! Environmental Crisis Posters (through November 3, 2024). The first Earth Day was in 1970. Posters were effective then and now in raising eco-consciousness. This exhibit has what is easily the most famous environmental image of all time, that of an American Indian with a tear in his eye invoked by looking at litter and pollution. You couldn’t do this kind of setup anymore. The actor was a white Italian American dude in red-face. It worked, though. So too have subsequent eco posters. The pity of course is that we were warned about the coming environmental crisis and the piper is now collecting his fee.
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