Milton Glaser might well be a designer's designer - but for many outside the field, he is the personification of the design arts. Widely known for his Bob Dylan poster, the I [heart] NY logo, and as a co-founder of New York magazine, Glaser has also created an enduring legacy as a teacher at the School of Visual Arts and as a designer of SVA's institutional messages. A 50-year retrospective of the printed matter that he created for the college is on view through Saturday, September 26, at the Visual Arts Gallery.

Left to right: Camus: Rebellion, Resistance, Death, subway poster, 2003; Big Nudes, Visual Arts Gallery exhibition poster, 1966; Polish Poster, Visual Arts Gallery exhibition poster, 1966. Courtesy SVA.

The exhibition presents nearly 100 works made by Glaser since the mid-1960s. Mainly posters and related sketches, the show focuses on his artistry in designing for the written word in an institutional setting. And Designing for the Written Word (1963), the title of one of the early course announcement cards (done with art director Henry Wolf), sets the pace for a series of small posters that were taped onto walls inside the school. The Poison Pen (1965), illustrated with green snake whose pen-nib head strikes at a target beyond the page, demonstrates the way in which Milton used art to tell a story, not to simply shed light on an idea. In the same vein, Polish Poster, an exhibit announcement, uses typography in the highly identifiable style of the subject. The artistry is in the way in which Glaser layered the typographic message to emulate torn layers of posters commonly found on city walls.

Glaser has said, "I believe the work I've done for the college is more adventuresome than anything else I've done, primarily because of the audience." Among the most adventuresome are the posters he created for SVA's long running subway advertising series. Art-directed by the late Silas Rhodes, the school's founder, who invited Glaser to join the faculty in 1969, these large-scale images, with brief punchy messages, are memorable for the way in which the designer created art that is the message.

Take, for example, Surface, Texture, Form, Line, Color. Only Words Until an Artist Uses Them. The illustration riffs on the cutouts of Henri Matisse, but Glaser's art expresses the world of design and its processes through the bits of masking tape holding the cutouts in place. For Our Times Call for Multiple Careers (1973) Glaser created a watercolor painting of a juggler reminiscent of Picasso's Blue Period. For his most recent poster in the series, The Secret of Art (2008), Glaser created art in the computer, using a photograph of a crumpled sheet of watercolor paper tossed on the floor to convey the idea that if you want to be better than good, you must keep trying.

The exhibition is curated by Steven Heller, design historian and co-chair of the MFA Design Department, and Mirko Ilic, designer and faculty member in the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay Department. Beth Kleber, SVA's archivist, researched and compiled the works, and gallery director Francis Di Tommaso designed the installation.

Milton Glaser's SVA: A Legacy of Graphic Design closes this Saturday, September 26^th at 6:00 pm. Visual Arts Gallery, 601 West 26^th Street between 11^th and 12^th Avenues, 15^th floor, New York, NY. Gallery hours: Monday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. For information: 212-592-2145.