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Seventy-five years ago, when former Army pilot Silas H. Rhodes and cartoonist Burne Hogarth founded a career-focused school aimed at returning World War II veterans—known then as the Cartoonists & Illustrators School—there was little indication that their endeavor would grow to become the School of Visual Arts, one of the world’s leading art and design colleges. 

From its inaugural enrollment of 35 to its current tally of some 7,000 undergraduate, graduate and continuing-education students, and from an initial curriculum focused on commercial and comics illustration to one that now encompasses interior design, filmmaking, art therapy and more, SVA’s trajectory over the past seven and a half decades has been remarkable. And chief among its legacies is its alumni community, now 41,000 strong, and its roster of current and former faculty, both of which include some of the most influential and celebrated creative professionals of the 20th and 21st centuries.

One such professional is Paul Davis (1959 Illustration), who both attended SVA as a student and later taught at the College. As a graphic designer and illustrator, Davis’ art has appeared on book and album covers, in magazines and newspapers and, perhaps most famously, on posters advertising productions of the Public Theater in New York City. Given this, he was a natural fit as the artist to create the latest, anniversary-themed SVA poster, which went on display in New York City’s subway stations earlier this month.

“Paul Davis is an icon of American illustration as well as an SVA legend—and I’m honestly not overstating the case here,” says BFA Advertising and BFA Design Chair Gail Anderson (BFA 1984 Media Arts), who is also creative director of the Visual Arts Press, SVA’s in-house design studio. So when SVA Executive Vice President Anthony P. Rhodes, the executive creative director of the Press, suggested Davis as the artist to design an SVA subway poster commemorating the College’s anniversary, Anderson’s response, she says, was “‘Absolutely.’ It was as simple as that. Actually, kind of a no-brainer. And who’s more lovely to work with than Paul Davis?” 

Reached on the phone at his home in Sag Harbor on Long Island, Davis recently took some time to talk about his design, which is now on display in subway stations throughout New York City.

You’ve created several subway posters for SVA. How did you approach this one? 

I came to the school in 1955 with a scholarship and it was still called Cartoonists & Illustrators School then. It was almost 90 percent World War II or Korean War veterans. Between the daytime and the nighttime students, I think there were only about 300 students. Now, it’s become a college with 19 master’s programs with thousands of students and I thought, ‘How on Earth can I show any of that?’

The arrow was to express this incredible, dynamic growth of the school. It's always been an art school, so I emphasized that. I wanted it to look handmade.

I noticed SVA’s brushstroke flower logo in the composition. Is it an homage to your former teacher, George Tscherny? [Tscherny created the SVA logo for the College’s 50th anniversary in 1997.]

Yes. I studied with George. He doesn’t know yet, but I’m going to give him a call to tell him. 

Did the solution come to you quickly? How might you describe your artistic process?

I’ll tell you a funny story about that. One time I was having dinner with a group of writers and there were two artists there, me and Saul Steinberg. All the other writers were talking about how they get started and what they do to get going. 

But Saul came up with the most profound thing I’ve ever heard to describe the artistic process. He said, “I don’t know. If I did know what was gonna happen at the studio in my studio, I wouldn’t bother going there.” 

It pretty much describes perfectly how I go about my process. 

What are you busy with these days?

I have a show coming up in Civitanova Marche, Italy, next month. For the announcement, I actually reused one of the posters I did for SVA a while back, “How Bad Do You Want to Be Good?” 

Myrna [Davis, Paul’s wife] and I are also doing a lot of work for the Theatre for a New Audience [at Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn]. When [longtime SVA faculty member and Acting Chairman of the Board] Milton Glaser died, the artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz asked if we could take over doing the graphics. It’s mostly online, but every time they do a show, I do a small poster for it.

Do you think printed posters are still relevant during a time when we’re mostly all glued to digital screens?

It’s a thing that’s never going to go away. Over and over, people have thought that there was no reason to use posters because we had radio, then we had television, we had everything else, but posters have always been unique. Unfortunately, a lot of the advertising posters have just been terrible, but it is an art form. When it’s done well, it can be so beautiful.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Anne Quito (MFA 2014 Design Criticism) is a journalist and design critic. She wrote Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines (2019) with Walter Bernard (1961 Graphic Design) and the late Milton Glaser.