This fall, SVA will honor author, graphic designer and illustrator Christoph Niemann with its 29th Masters Series award and exhibition. Established in 1988 by SVA founder Silas H. Rhodes as a way to honor the great visual communicators of our time, the Masters Series brings greater exposure to those whose influence has been felt strongly and by many, but whose names often go unrecognized by the public.

Over his three-decade career, Niemann has worked with a range of publications and corporations, building a prolific body of work distinguished by its visual humor and inventiveness. Niemann has illustrated the New York City Marathon—while running it—for The New York Times. He has animated his drawings for Google Doodles (temporary reinventions of the logo on the search engine’s homepage) and created animated and interactive digital versions of his cover illustrations for The New Yorker. He has created two apps: Petting Zoo, which allow users to distort, augment and animate his drawings, and Chomp, which offers 52 animated scenes into which users can incorporate their own videos. And he has written and/or illustrated more than a dozen books, most recently Sunday Sketching (Abrams, 2016), which features select work from throughout his career and serves as an in-depth look at his creative process and philosophy.

In advance of his exhibition, which opens on September 30 at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, the Visual Arts Journal asked Niemann to select and talk about some of his work.

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