A Year In Review With Our Executive Director

It feels a bit surreal to be celebrating Poster House’s five year anniversary. Seven years ago, I was hired to help open the space—a whirlwind lesson in New York City commercial real estate and exhibition planning. First based out of a WeWork downtown, we steadily grew our initial staff to include a roster of some of the best museum professionals I have ever encountered, building a new kind of museum in the city that never sleeps (and, to be fair, those few first years, most of us didn’t either).

Since opening to the public in 2019, we’ve seen more than our share of milestones—a complete list of which would make this post far too long. Instead, I want to focus on just what we’ve accomplished during this capstone year, one that has indeed solidified our place in the cultural landscape of Manhattan.

Always impressive, our Design and Exhibits team received not one but five exhibition design awards for their tremendous work, including recognition from the Type Directors Club, PRINT magazine, and AIGA. I constantly hear feedback from other museum professionals around the world as to the high quality of our exhibition design, and I truly believe we have some of the most ambitious graphic installations in the country—and it makes me so proud to see that the wider design community feels the same way.

This past year, we also launched our first exhibition catalogue. Created with Abrams Books, this publication honored our blockbuster exhibition Wonder City of the World: New York City Travel Posters, curated by my mentor-in-posters, Nicholas Lowry. Writing a book is no small feat, and I’m hopeful that it’s something we can continue to produce as a means of expanding poster scholarship and establishing ourselves as an authority within the field. And to help support future poster historians, we also just opened the Rene Wanner Research Library, one of the foremost public collections of books on posters.

Our Education Department also had a record-breaking year, welcoming more than 2,500 students and launching its annual Family Day program, bringing the world of posters to the city’s youngest museumgoers. In an effort to supplement our Spanish-language wall text (available for all exhibitions), we’ve also established Spanish tours that will go into more regular rotation in the coming year. Additionally, we created a new partnership with the NYC Department of Education’s District 75, serving all the city’s students with disabilities and doubling down on our commitment to being one of the most accessible museums in New York.

Finally, our Block Party, held as part of West Side Fest, saw record-breaking attendance when it welcomed over 2,000 visitors to the museum in a single day. I like to see it as a microcosm of our wider programmatic offerings that on the first Friday of every month introduce new audiences to Poster House. The events we put on every week demonstrate that posters are indeed for everyone, and that every single person is welcomed and seen by the museum at large. 

I know we will continue to offer this kind of radical hospitality to all our visitors in 2025, providing them with dynamic exhibitions and unique experiences through posters. I am so excited to announce our spring roster of shows, which cover everything from the history of nuclear proliferation and the father of the Puerto Rican poster to the world’s most prolific gig poster artist and early subway advertising. None of this would be possible without the hard work of my incredible colleagues and the support of all of you—and I can’t wait to see what our sixth year of operation will bring!

Best,

Angelina Lippert

Executive Director & Curator