Steven Heller, School of Visual Arts’ MFA Design Co-Chair has had enough of a career that even summarizing it is exhausting. He has written, co-written and edited more than 200 books of design and illustration history and criticism. His new memoir—or as he might say, "prequel to the bio", was recently published by Princeton Architectural Press. SVA's Visual Arts Journal takes a look at the book, and the counter-culture art that Heller directed in the salad days of his unstoppable career. Here we repost the feature, written by Greg Herbowy, along with some of the covers Heller designed. 

A longtime contributor to Print (and many other magazines), Heller [also] maintains a blog, The Daily Heller, for the brand’s website, of which he is a part-owner. For 33 years, he was an art director (and then senior art director) and contributor at The New York Times, shaping the look of its Op-Ed page and weekly Book Review. And as an SVA faculty member since 1974 and co-founder of five of the College’s graduate programs, he stands on a short list of the most influential shapers of the College and its mission (see page 42 of Visual Arts Journal).  

Very little of this is covered in Growing Up Underground, Heller’s new memoir, published this fall by Princeton Architectural Press. Instead, as the title suggests, the book primarily focuses on his coming of age in New York City in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when he began his career as a strikingly younghttps://papress.com/products/growing-up-undergroundand comparatively straitlaced— design talent in the anarchic, roguish world of independent journalism. 

Born and raised in Manhattan, Heller was the only child in a middle-class Jewish family with two working parents. A love of drawing sustained him through the pains of adolescence, and shortly after graduating high school he lucked into an art director job at an alt-weekly called the New York Free Press, and sold his cartoons to other counterculture publications. This soon led to art-director roles at such outlets as the pornographic Screw and the short-lived Mobster Times— both created by the proudly disreputable publisher Al Goldstein—as well as work for the East Village Other, known for its support of underground comics artists like Robert Crumb; Andy Warhol’s Interview, which Heller redesigned in 1971; and a host of now-forgotten but equally iconoclastic publications. 

All of this, it should be said, happened before he turned 25. (By that age, he was a full year into his tenure at the Times.) Accordingly, Heller’s story is a busy one. There were brushes with the law and with lawbreakers. There were strange victories, such as when he convinced a jury in Wichita, Kansas, where Goldstein was on trial for breaking federal obscenity laws, that Screw’s art direction gave the publication redeeming social value. And there were noble misfires, such as Heller’s stint at the doomed Rolling Stone copycat Rock, where he got to know a pre-fame Patti Smith and her longtime collaborator Lenny Kaye, both of whom wrote for the tabloid. 

“I happened to be in the right medium, at the right place, at the right time,” Heller says. “It was a moment when technology and economics made alternative newspapers viable, and there were a lot of people who had something to say about what was going on in society.” (Chiefly the Vietnam War, of which Heller was a vocal opponent.) 

“It takes a certain amount of hubris to write a memoir,” he says. “But my experience of the ’60s was not the same as the stereotype. I didn’t do trips and get high, but I did enjoy the freedom we appeared to be taking and the resulting upset it put on the older generation.”  Images courtesy of SVA Visual Arts Journal.

Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York by Steven Heller (Princeton Architectural Press (2022)

Editor's note: This feature is reprinted with permission from SVA Visual Art Journal Fall/Winter edition