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The School of Visual Arts lost one of its most beloved and influential figures late last week when artist, illustrator, author and filmmaker Marshall Arisman, founder and chair of the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program and longtime College faculty member, died suddenly of heart failure.

Arisman joined the SVA faculty in 1964. Three years later he was named chair of Design and Illustration. In 1970, as the College transitioned to offering BFA degrees, he became co-chair, with Richard Wilde, of Media Arts. In 1984, he founded SVA’s MFA illustration department. Then called MFA Illustration as Visual Journalism, it was the College’s second graduate offering, after MFA Fine Arts. Nearly 40 years on, it is one of the most distinguished programs of its kind. Its many notable alumni include MacArthur Fellowship-winning author Lauren Redniss (2000); children’s book creators Brian Floca (2001), Stephen Savage (1996) and Shadra Strickland (2005); and illustrator Yuko Shimizu (2003).

Among his students, Arisman was known for his emphasis on mining one’s own biography to find and develop an individual artistic identity, rather than following the changing dictates and trends of the marketplace.

“The founding principles of the department are to teach illustrators to tell their own stories and to break down the distinction between illustration and fine art,” he said in an interview for the program’s 30th anniversary. “My first assignment is to have students stand up in front of the class one by one and tell a personal story and show an illustration that goes with it, only to prove the point that the stories are more interesting than the illustrations, and to encourage them to start tapping into their own subject matter for inspiration.”

“There’s that ‘aura of Marshall,’” said 2002 program alumnus Nathan Fox, comics artist and chair of MFA Visual Narrative at SVA. “It’s all about ‘Who are you?’ and ‘What’s your voice?’ and ‘How do you solve problems?’”

“Marshall’s influence has been much greater than a succession of important roles,” said David Rhodes, president of SVA. “A singular, protean figure in his profession, his editorial illustration is instantly recognizable and universally admired, his painting and sculpture provided spiritual context throughout. His rich deep voice was full of stories; whether he was speaking just to you or to a packed auditorium he was simultaneously modest and mesmerizing, and the story might somehow morph into a saxophone solo.

“Marshall’s passing impacts generations of his students—those many shelves of [their published] books always made him proud—as well as generations of colleagues who will remember his grace and generosity.”

Born in 1938, Arisman grew up in a rural community near the Western New York city of Jamestown, a place where guns, hunting and barnyard butchery were part of everyday life. His grandmother Louise, known as a psychic and medium, lived in the nearby spiritualist community of Lily Dale. By his own account, both elements of his upbringing—the earthly and the ethereal—were equally influential on his art and illustration, which often depicted (and sometimes intermingled) wild animals, violent or menacing scenes and sacred figures and auras. The tagline for his 2014 series of SVA posters, “Art is the space between angels and demons,” was inspired by advice that his grandmother gave him, and doubled as his own artistic mission: “I’ve been trying to occupy that space ever since,” he said.

After graduating from the Pratt Institute in 1960, Arisman worked briefly as a graphic designer—including three months at GM, where he helped develop the Delco battery logo—before transitioning to illustration. In 1973, he self-published Frozen Images, a collection whose pen-and-ink drawings of grisly scenarios established his early reputation among newspaper and magazine art directors as, in his phrasing, “the go-to guy whenever there was a murder.” Over the course of his career, he contributed to The New York Times, Time, Playboy, The Progressive and U.S. News & World Report, among others. Other assignments include the indelible cover for Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and, at the request of author Thomas Harris, the jacket for a limited-edition 2015 reissue of The Silence of the Lambs (1988).

In his personal practice, Arisman often gravitated toward more enlightened subject matter, like spirituality and the natural world. His paintings, prints, sculptures and drawings are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the National Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as private and corporate collections. His multimedia works include the 2009 short film The Last Tribe and Cobalt Blue, a 2008 album of imagery, stories and music. Among other honors, Arisman is an inductee in the Art Directors and Society of Illustrators halls of fame and the subject of Facing the Audience: The Arts of Marshall Arisman, a 2004 documentary by Tony Silver, among other articles, interviews and films. In 2003, SVA celebrated his work with a Masters Series Award and Exhibition; in 2017, the College presented the retrospective “Marshall Arisman: An Artist’s Journey from Dark to Light” at its SVA Chelsea Gallery. He is survived by his wife, writer Dee Ito, and his brother- and sister-in-law Joel and Joyce Ito and their children and grandchildren, and predeceased by his parents, Helen and Walter, and brother, Bruce.

In a 2018 video interview with Arisman and Ito about the SVA posters they created over the years (above), Arisman talked about his instinctive, oblique approach to image-making.

“You either follow what you do or you try to lead it, and I stopped trying to lead it,” he said. “I’ll do anything to get rid of my rational brain. So I play these games with myself, in the hopes that some other part of me will come out and talk for a minute.”

For more on the life and work of Marshall Arisman, visit marshallarisman.com.