The School of Visual Arts alumnus and longtime faculty member discusses the creative impulses behind her vibrant new subway poster for the College
School of Visual Arts alumnus and longtime faculty member Carol Fabricatore standing in front of her summer 2023 SVA subway poster, which is installed next to an earlier poster by her late friend and SVA colleague Marshall Arisman.
“I love color; I like movement; I like energy. I love drawing people,” enthuses Carol Fabricatore (MFA 1992 Illustration as Visual Essay), a painter, illustrator and longtime faculty member at the School of Visual Arts. Fabricatore is the latest artist to create a design for the College’s long-running “subway series” posters—its advertising campaign created for display in New York City’s subway stations—and all of those enthusiasms are evident in her piece, which went on display earlier this month.
“Think about art . . . as a new beginning for a creative life,” Fabricatore’s poster reads, in copy by writer Dee Ito, the widow and longtime creative partner of Fabricatore’s late friend, colleague and mentor Marshall Arisman, founding chair of MFA Illustration as Visual Essay, who died last year.
SVA alumnus and longtime faculty member Carol Fabricatore’s summer 2023 SVA subway poster.
A colorful, evocative work, Fabricatore’s design is bountiful, brimming with life, symbols of growth, a fiery phoenix rising and creative life taking flight.
“The fire eater is holding a pencil, so her creativity blossoms and ignites and takes off as a bird,” she says. “The same thing happens with nature. . . . There’s the whole growth cycle, the beginning, middle, and end. . . . You need all these different ideas to come together and evolve into other things. The drawings come to life.”
SVA alumnus and faculty member Carol Fabricatore with writer Dee Ito in front of the College’s summer 2023 subway poster. Ito, who has written the taglines for many of SVA’s best-known posters, also wrote the copy for Fabricatore’s design: “Think about art . . . as a new beginning for a creative life.”
“I was thinking about growth and fire,” she says of her inspiration for the image. “I just wanted something magical and inspiring.” Sketchbook drawings were another essential part of the process. “The sketchbook is a doorway to possibility; you can take those drawings, those ideas, and have them germinate. Anything’s possible.”
In addition to serving on the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay faculty since 1994, Fabricatore also teaches in BFA Design, BFA Fine Arts, BFA Illustration and the College’s Pre-College Program. Her illustrations have appeared in such publications as Business Week, GQ, McCall’s, New Woman, The New York Times, Redbook, Seventeen, Travel + Leisure and The Wall Street Journal, and been recognized with honors from American Illustration, The Black Book AR100, Graphic Design USA and Society of Illustrators, among others.
Check out the latest SVA “subway series” video below to hear more from Fabricatore on her new poster and her artistic practice.
SVA alumnus and faculty member Carol Fabricatore (MFA 1992 Illustration as Visual Essay) discusses the many creative inspirations behind her fiery and vibrant new design for the College’s long-running series of subway ad posters.