Poster House’s First Awards!

Over the past year, Poster House has received several awards recognizing our exhibition content and design–our first since opening our doors in 2019.

In June 2023, the Victorian Society New York named our exhibition Ethel Reed: I Am My Own Property as its 2022 Exhibition of the Year! Curated by Chief Curator and Director of Content Angelina Lippert and designed by Isometric Studio, this show was a fascinating look at the life of one of the only female poster designers of the late 1800s. Living in Boston, Reed wove symbolic meaning into her posters for books and magazines, and curated her own public image in the male-dominated art world as she grappled with addiction and depression. With exhibition design by Isometric Studios, this was the first major museum exhibition dedicated to her work, highlighting over 30 original posters, many of which feature notably provocative women for the time.

The shows Made in Japan: 20th-Century Poster Art and Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party both won several awards for their exhibition design, created by KASA Collective, including the Graphic Design USA award in American Digital Design and American Graphic Design, and the Communication Arts Magazine award for environmental design. Since our inception in 2019, Poster House has worked with KASA Collective on many projects, including the museum’s interactive elements, and it was a pleasure continuing that relationship with these incredible shows. Its vision for Made in Japan was inspired by one of the posters in the exhibition by Ikko Tanaka that they expanded to create a truly immersive and colorful experience. Meanwhile, KASA Collective’s approach in Black Power applied symbols such as stars and eagles to punctuate the narrative, as well as two double-sided steel display cases.

Also in June 2023, our 2022 Block Party Advertising Suite designed by Zipeng Zhu won a PRINT Design Award in advertising. This was our first Block Party, and we wanted the design to be joyful and attractive to both New Yorkers and tourists. Zhu incorporated his signature vibrant palette alongside iconic New York imagery, including pigeons, coffee cups, and traffic cones. We launched a citywide wild-posting poster campaign, and the assets were used across print and digital media.

While the typographic treatments for both the Ethel Reed exhibition and The Utopian Avant-Garde: Soviet Film Posters of the 1920s won type awards from the Society of Typographic Arts for the work designed by Isometric Studio, 2023 was the first time the larger context and content of a Poster House exhibition was recognized. 

We are thrilled to receive such a positive response as an institution that is still young and growing, and grateful that these accolades are the result of both in-house expertise and important collaborations within the design community.