Design exhibition of Paula Scher, New York Artist

Although design history books are full of memorable work, the examples that meet this standard of vernacular are rare. Nonetheless, Paula Scher has come as close as anyone to creating a real vernacular through the posters she designed for the New York Public Theater. In fact, she took the existing vernacular of bold advertising typefaces endemic to common bills and flyers and transformed it into a distinctive street-language-cum-brand for a major cultural institution. One cannot look at any of the posters from her 10 year tenure as designer for "The Public" without thinking that this is an integral part of New York's essence.

Scher's work has made an impact on New York through numerous posters and environmental signs and graphics. She is among a privileged few who have directly contributed to the cityscape through designs for museums, schools, institutions, and stores. While her oeuvre is not only New York-centric it is largely comprised of icons rooted in the ethos of the city. Her penchant for bold, slab-serif, gothic type is as much homage to the monumental architecture of New York as it is a tool to compete with the onslaught of media emanating from this town. Add to this her conceptual acuity born of sarcastic, urbane wit and it is fair to say that Scher's design, while uniquely her own, epitomizes a New York attitude.

Much of Scher's work is recognizable to anyone who has walked the streets or scanned a design annual. Yet it also traces the aesthetic evolution of a public image-maker who has borrowed from and built upon design's legacy. Scher's posters are familiar to most of us at first glance not because she designs with the same typefaces or colors (even though she has her favorites), but rather because she has an incredible mastery of space and the nuance of form that few contemporary poster-wannabes can claim. And this enables her to effectively commandeer the public's eye, if not their mind. Over the past two decades Scher has earned her place among renown artists, Bernhard, Cassandre, Davis, Glaser, and Chwast, and all on her own terms. Her posters are both narration and logo - she tells us stories as she creates her brands. Even during a period when cluttered composition and ambiguous message were in fashion, Scher rarely lost sight, even during periods of her own experimentation, of the true goal of graphic design - to lodge a clear and memorable message in the audience's cortex (and make us laugh more often than not).

Steven Heller

Paula Scher studied at the Tyler school of art in Philadelphia. In 1984, she co-founded the design firm Koppel & Scher in New York City and in 1991 she joined the world famous multi-disciplinary design firm Pentagram Design as principal. Scher has developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics and packaging designs for a wide range of clients including The New York Times Magazine, the American Museum of Natural History, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Public Theater, Swatch, Sony and many others. Scher's work is represented in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Zürich Poster Museum, the Denver Art Museum and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. She has earned distinguished awards. In 1998, she was named to The Art Directors Club Hall of Fame.