From Bob Dylan Posters to Underground Art: Milton Glaser in the Village
Few graphic designers get to achieve national recognition for their work in a variety of media, and have their designs continue to influence and delight the public after their careers end. Milton Glaser, who received a National Medal of Arts in 2009, was one such outstanding designer, and he got his start here in the East Village and Greenwich Village.
Born June 26, 1929, in the Bronx, Glaser graduated from Cooper Union in 1951, where he and other students received full-tuition scholarships from the endowment established by Peter Cooper. Glaser’s talent mixed commercial art and fine art to yield a potent new language in design, Co-founding Push Pin Studios in 1954 with friends from Cooper Union, including Seymour Chwast, enabled him to further grow and highlight those talents.
Glaser was best known in the 1960s for his flamboyant and psychedelia-tinged illustrated posters and album covers. In 1965, for example, he designed Greenwich Village–based Peter, Paul and Mary’s first hugely successful album, See What Tomorrow Brings; the logo, which the band used throughout its creative heyday, employed Kalligraphia, a typeface that soon became synonymous with the folk revolution.
The following year, Glaser created something even more iconic: his poster of Bob Dylan that was packaged with the singer-songwriter’s Greatest Hits collection. Glaser depicted Dylan in simple profile, his abundant curly hair rendered in swirling streams of oversaturated color that evoked the effect of psychedelic drugs and the impact of 1960s counterculture.
Glaser and Push Pin Studios grew to become an international creative force in the 1960s and ’70s, with a legacy that continues to inspire designers and illustrators today. During this period, Glaser crafted his perhaps most recognizable and beloved work: I ♥️NY. Created in 1975 for New York State at a time when tourism was on the downswing, the logo’s three letters and one pictograph have become a part of our general language. (His original sketch, done in the back of a taxi, today has a home in The Museum of Modern Art.) “It has been called with some hyperbole the most frequently replicated piece of printed ephemera of the century,” Glaser wrote in his 2000 tome Art Is Work. The source of inspiration for the stacked letter was supposedly the “LOVE” design by Robert Indiana, another artist who got his start in the East Village.
The immediately recognizable symbol has been replicated innumerable times since its inception: by Glaser himself in his “I ♥️ NY More Than Ever” design following 9/11, by other cities and states trying to grab New York’s success with the logo, and elsewhere. And while the state and city governments tried to replace the iconic design with a “WE ♥️ NYC” 2023 — a logo not warmly received by designers and other New Yorkers — the superior original that inspired so many still lives on through T-shirts, plastic bags, coffee cups, and the hearts of NYC residents.
Glaser continued to work on nationally recognized projects, some of which maintained a focus on his local neighborhood. In 1976, for example, he designed the poster for the Paul Mazursky film Next Stop Greenwich Village. The following decade yielded one of his largest-scale works, located in the East Village. In 1986, Glaser designed new mosaics at the Astor Place subway station, across the street from his alma mater, as part of the station’s long-overdue cleanup and reconstruction. The geometric porcelain enamel murals pay homage to the station’s original ceramic tiles, and brighten the station for everyone. (Left out of Glaser’s design: a mural of a beaver, similar to those already in the station honoring the Astor family’s origins in the fur trade, because the Metropolitan Transportation Authority felt it was too reminiscent of a giant rat.) The project was one of the first in the MTA’s Arts for Transit program, and helped to show the popularity of devoting a percentage of station rehabilitation funds toward artistic works, a program that continues throughout the city today as MTA Arts & Design.
Glaser passed away in 2020, on his 91st birthday. You can view more of his work on his website and on the site for the nearby School of Visual Arts, where he was a faculty member for several decades.