A permanent collection of 7,000 historical posters collected from around the world and 1,000 contemporary posters that will be shown in future exhibitions. On June 20, Poster House, the first museum in the United States dedicated exclusively to the art of poster design, opened the doors to the public in New York. A collection that presents a global view of posters from their earliest appearance in the late 1800s, to their present-day use.
“Posters are incredible documents of the societies and times they spring from, and have so much to tell us, not only about the history of advertising and design, but the world we live in today,” said Poster House Director Julia Knight. “There’s so much ground to cover, and we’re thrilled to begin sparking new conversations about this truly populist medium, which is such a part of all our lives”.
The new museum, located in Chelsea, will also host exhibitions of international posters from all time periods and cultures, exploring how this ephemeral medium came to be the people’s art, beginning with two exhibitions of groundbreaking design, both on view through October 6. The first is dedicated to Alphonse Mucha (Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau / Nouvelle Femme), the most celebrated graphic designer of the Art Nouveau movement. His style and status started when he met the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt. Mucha’s first poster elevated her fame and launched his graphic design career. The luminous posters are displayed alongside contemporaneous posters, advertisements, and jewelry, and mark the first major exhibition of Mucha’s work in New York since 1921.
The other exhibition, Designing Through the Wall: Cyan in the 1990s, analyzes the works of graphic design agency Cyan of Detlaf Fiedler and Daniela Haufe, the first poster artists to utilize early desktop publishing tools like Photoshop and QuarkXPress.
In the fall, Poster House will host two new exhibitions, The Golden Age of Ghanaian Hand-Painted Film Posters and Three Years Later: The 2017 Women’s March & Where We Are Today. Both exhibitions will open on October 16, 2019 and run through January 4, 2020.
Poster House features three exhibition spaces for rotating exhibitions, a cafe, a children’s area, an educational workshop, gift shop, interactive features designed by Kasa, including the opportunity to realize your own virtual poster.
