Seymour Chwast

Graphic Designer / United States / The Pushpin Group

Seymour Chwast was born in New York City and is a graduate of The Cooper Union, where he studied illustration and graphic design. He is a founding partner, along with Milton Glaser and Edward Sorel, of the celebrated Push Pin Studios (1954), whose distinct style has had a worldwide influence on contemporary visual communications. The studio’s name was changed in the early 1980s to The Pushpin Group, of which Chwast is the director.

His clients have included leading corporations, advertising agencies, and publishing companies both in the U. S. and abroad. His designs and illustrations have been used in advertising, animated films, corporate and environmental graphics, publications, posters, packaging, and record covers. He created background images for a production of Candide at Lincoln Center in New York, and a production of The Magic Flute the Opera Company of Philadelphia. He has designed and illustrated more than 30 children’s books and has developed several typefaces. He published The Push Pin Graphic, a magazine with subscribers all over the world. Two books on his work, The Push Pin Graphic  and The Left-Handed Designer, have been published.

Chwast’s designs and illustrations have been exhibited in major galleries and museums in the U. S., Europe, Japan, Brazil, and Russia. Chwast and Push Pin were honored at the Louvre in Paris in a two-month retrospective exhibition titled "The Push Pin Style." He has had several one-man shows of his paintings, sculptures, and prints in this country. His posters are in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art; the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; the Library of Congress; the Gutenberg Museum; and the Israel Museum, among others. The American Institute of Graphic Arts awarded him the AIGA Medal for 1985. He has an honorary Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and Rhode Island School of Design and in 1984 was inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame.

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