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Last year, designer and art director Pablo Delcan (BFA 2012 Graphic Design), whose work often appears in The New York Times,  turned this idea on its head with Prompt Brush, his non-AI generative art model. Users from around the world submit open-ended illustration challenges for Delcan to take on, and he posts the results online. “I aim for a rapid reaction, akin to how an AI might respond,” he wrote in a Times article about the project last fall. “But because I’m a human, the process is necessarily different.” 

The latest School of Visual Arts poster, which went up in New York City subway stations around New York City earlier this winter, features Delcan’s illustration of an oval-shaped chick, drawn in response to the prompt “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”  

“The poster was [developed through] a crowdsource of prompts sent in by faculty, students, and staff from SVA,” Delcan says. Delcan selected 50 prompts to illustrate and sent the resulting works to Gail Anderson (BFA 1984 Media Arts), chair of the College’s BFA Advertising and BFA Design departments and creative director of the Visual Arts Press, SVA’s in-house design studio. The prompt came from Delcan’s friend and former classmate Daniel Rodriguez (BFA 2012 Graphic Design). 

“The best thing about the posters has been to see people engage it with graffiti,” Delcan says. “I’ve also been receiving a ton more prompts from subway goers.”

The spring 2025 SVA poster is Declan’s second for the College; his first, in 2018, featured pencils twisted to form the tagline, “Art Is!” In September, Chronicle Chroma will publish a book in September collecting work from Delcan’s Prompt Brush project to date; in the meantime, keep up with the work (or submit a prompt of your own) at prompt-brush.com or on Instagram, @prompt.brush, and check out a video about Delcan’s 2018 SVA poster below.