The Church: ‘Yes, No, and WOW: the Push Pin Studios Revolution’ / Oct 6th thru Dec 30th

Yes, No, and WOW: the Push Pin Studios Revolution

Paul Davis, How bad do you want to be good? © Paul Davis. Courtesy of artist.

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OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY, October 5th | 6:00-7:30 PM

The exhibition will run from October 6^th – December 30th

Yes, No, and WOW: the Push Pin Studios Revolution presents a like-minded group of six graphic artists who came together in the mid-20th century to form a graphic design firm that had a profound and lasting cultural impact. Three of the six artists have deep ties to Sag Harbor, and this exhibition continues The Church’s series of exhibitions that seek to illuminate the cultural, creative, and artistic history of our community.

Push Pin Studios began as a loose collaboration among four Cooper Union graduates. Seymour Chwast, Milton Glaser, Reynold Ruffins, and Ed Sorel’s first radical acts were to create tongue-in-cheek publications to promote their art and design to art directors in advertising and publishing. The Push Pin Almanack was a playful throwback to 19^th-century advertising, employing antique type and techniques such as woodcut, cross-hatching, and other antiquated conventions of graphics for commerce that put the whole culture on notice with their unabashed playfulness and boldness.

The Almanack and its eventual successor, the Push Pin Graphic, had an overwhelming reception almost immediately. The studio expanded to include many other artists, including Sag Harbor denizens Paul Davis and James McMullan. Each artist offered new imagery, full of verve, irreverence, and inventiveness, liberating illustration and graphic design from the reigning culture of modernism. Push Pin Studios became an international phenomenon, changing the way America and the rest of the world experienced the upheaval of the second half of the 20th Century, influencing illustration and design for books and magazines, posters, murals, and even films. The courage of invention was the core of their impulse.

This exhibition will include actual materials from the Push Pin archive, including chapbooks, almanacks, posters, books, vinyl record covers, and objects from the six aforementioned artists: Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, Milton Glaser, James McMullan, Reynold Ruffins and Ed Sorel, spanning the 50s into the 21st Century. We will be hosting talks by surviving members of this group as part of our exhibition-related activities throughout its run.

With humor, humanity, and optimism, Push Pin Studios inspired a revolutionary design environment whose impact can still be seen and felt today.

As Milton Glaser said, “There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.”

Yes, No, and WOW: the Push Pin Studios Revolution is curated by April Gornik and Myrna Davis.

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THE ARTISTS

SEYMOUR CHWAST A master of historical styles and movements, graphic designer Seymour Chwast is known for his diverse body of work, and lasting influence on American visual culture. Cofounder of the internationally recognized and critically acclaimed Push Pin Studios, Chwast has developed and refined his innovative approach to design over the course of six decades. Personal, urgent, and obsessive, his eclectic oeuvre has delighted and guided subsequent generations while revolutionizing the field of graphic design.

http://seymourchwastarchive.com/

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PAUL BROOKS DAVIS, better known as Paul Davis, was born in 1938 in Centrahoma, Oklahoma. The middle of three children born to Howard Davis, a Methodist minister, and Susan Brookhart Davis, he spent his childhood in small towns: Caddo, Jenks, Hartshorne and Antlers, in Oklahoma, as well as Sulphur Springs, Arkansas; Ellis, Kansas; and, briefly, Great Falls, Montana. He attended Woodrow Wilson Junior High School (Tulsa, Oklahoma), and later, Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, where his talent was nurtured by art teacher Hortense Bateholts. While in high school, Davis, with friends Russell Myers and Archie Goodwin formed a cartoonist’s club that met daily at the Owl Drugstore at 11th Street and Pittsburg in Tulsa. Davis won a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts and at the age of 17 moved to New York. There, he studied with outstanding illustrators Philip Hays and Robert Weaver, and graphic designer and artist George Tscherny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Brooks_Davis

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MILTON GLASER (b.1929) is among the most celebrated graphic designers in the United States. He has had the distinction of one-man-shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Georges Pompidou Center. He was selected for the lifetime achievement award of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (2004) and the Fulbright Association (2011), and in 2009 he was the first graphic designer to receive the National Medal of the Arts award. As a Fulbright scholar, Glaser studied with the painter, Giorgio Morandi in Bologna, and is an articulate spokesman for the ethical practice of design. He opened Milton Glaser, Inc. in 1974, and continues to produce a prolific amount of work in many fields of design to this day.

PUSHPIN STUDIOS In 1954, Milton Glaser, along with Reynold Ruffins, Seymour Chwast, and Edward Sorel, founded Pushpin Studios. For twenty years Glaser, together with Seymour Chwast, directed the organization, which exerted a powerful influence on the direction of world graphic design, culminating in a memorable exhibition at the Louvres Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris..

https://www.miltonglaser.com/milton/#0

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JAMES McMULLAN has created images for magazine stories, books for adults and children, record covers, US stamps, murals and animated films but he is most well known for the over eighty posters he has done for Lincoln Center Theater. Among the most recognized of these posters are Anything Goes, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and My Fair Lady. To celebrate this achievement Lincoln Center Theater has recently mounted a permanent exhibit of his original poster art in the lobby of the Mitzi Newhouse Theater. In the December 2017 issue of Vanity Fair, Mark Rozzo writes, “He is to modern-day New York what Toulouse-Lautrec was to 19th-century Paris.”

https://jamesmcmullan.com/about

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REYNOLD RUFFINS’ present paintings and drawings are preceded by a career as an illustrator and designer. He is a graduate of The Cooper Union and a recipient of it’s most prestigious honor, The Augustus St. Gaudens Award for outstanding professional achievement in arts. The Cooper Union Presidential Citation was also presented to Ruffins for his work and prominence in his profession.

Ruffins’ work has been acclaimed in trade and design publications, among them: 200 Years of American Illustration, A History of Graphic Design, The Push Pin Graphic, African American Art, Graphis and How Magazine. His work is internationally recognized in group show exhibitions at The Louvre in Paris, Milan, Bologna and Tokyo.

https://www.reynoldruffins.com/about.html

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EDWARD SOREL has been a freelance artist since 1957. His illustrations, caricatures, and cartoons have appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, The Nation, Fortune, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He is the author and/or illustrator of twenty books, including The Zillionaire’s Daughter (1989), First Encounters (1994), Unauthorized Portraits (1997) The Saturday Kid (2000), Mary Astor’s Purple Diary (2016) and Profusely Illustrated (2021).

In 2008, Sorel painted murals for the Waverly Inn, and a year later murals for the Monkey Bar, both in New York City. He has had exhibits at National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the Davis Langdale Gallery in New York City, the Art Institute of Boston, and Galerie Bartch and Chariau in Munich, Germany, the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, Germany, and the Chris Beetles Gallery in London.

https://www.edwardsorel.net

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ABOUT THE CURATORS

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MYRNA DAVIS

Myrna Davis had a variety of roles at Push Pin Studios and served as the editor of Push Pin Graphic,1960-1965. She is managing partner of Paul Davis Studio and executive director emerita of the Art Directors Club in New York.

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APRIL GORNIK

Artist April Gornik’s paintings and drawings of land, sky and sea are anchored in observed reality and a world synthesized, abstracted, remembered and imagined. They offer the viewer an opportunity to explore dichotomies between past and present, expanse and its circumscription, intimacy in immensity, stillness and the inexorable momentum of atmospheric change. Her canvases – roiling seas, brewing skies, mountains and endless plains – internalize and engage nature’s proscenium. In these captured moments, the natural world triumphs and the mirror of time stares back.

Her work may be found in the public collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Cincinnati Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Fisher Landau Center, Long Island City, NY; Fort Worth Museum, Fort Worth, TX; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; United States Embassy, Beijing, China; United States Embassy, Moscow, Russia; University Gallery, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

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THE CHURCH

was established in 2019 by artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik. Housed in a deconsecrated 19th-century church, its doors were opened in April 2021. Our mission is to foster creativity and to honor the living history of Sag Harbor as a maker village. The East End represents an exceptional artistic legacy, spanning the practices of indigenous art of several centuries ago, Abstract Expressionists of the mid-20th Century, and the many celebrated writers, makers, musicians, and visual artists of the recent past and current moment. Core programming includes visual art exhibitions, concerts and events, educational programming, workshops, lectures, and an artist’s residency.