Special Projects

Poster House joined forces with PRINT Magazine, Time Square Arts, and Out Of Home advertisers around the city to apply design to the COVID-19 pandemic where it has hit the hardest: New York. Over 20 designers contributed their skills to create meaningful PSAs that launched on almost 2,000 screens across all five boroughs and three cities.

During this harrowing time, as the COVID-19 pandemic ravages New York and the nation, Poster House is committed to supporting our communities by sharing their stories. In January, one community in particular was hit, New York’s Chinatown, and Grace Young and Dan Ahn have produced this poignant video series about their travels through the neighborhood in early March, talking to affected business owners.

People of all ages and skill backgrounds are invited to participate in an ongoing series of online poster design workshops. Posters are created using physical or digital tools—whatever is most accessible to the designer! We begin each session with a brief introduction and presentation by Poster House Chief Curator Angelina Lippert on the history and purpose of posters. This is followed by an interactive workshop led by Isometric Studio partners Andy Chen and Waqas Jawaid.

Poster House Chief Curator Angelina Lippert can talk about posters anytime, anywhere! When Poster House closed due to COVID-19, she trekked over an hour to the museum to do mini-tours of the permanent collection and then gave us access to dozens more posters in her home to fawn over during lockdown.

Poster House hosts an online series of events for college and graduate students to explore opportunities in the worlds of art, design, and museums. This lecture series illuminates the many different professions that go into building and running a museum, but that can be hidden or unseen.

In Winter 2018, Poster House partnered with The Library of Congress to showcase 31 important pieces from their poster collection in order to reach new audiences with an animation contest open to students, professionals, and amateurs alike. Participants browsed images for the contest on The Library’s Free to Use & Reuse page under Poster Parade.

In 2019, Poster House opened its first show sourced entirely from the museum’s permanent collection.

This exhibition, 20/20 InSight: Posters from the 2017 Women’s March was a powerful look at the unique ways Americans protest, as told through the lens of posters collected from the 2017 Women’s March. The march emphasized that protesting is part of American culture and is an essential expression of our constitutional rights.

The posters in the collection span the subjects of Women’s Rights, Climate Change, Immigration, LGBTQ+ Issues, and, of course, #BlackLivesMatter. The incorporated graphics and poster images have been carried through generations of marches, rallies, and grassroots action. Today’s demonstrators also display symbols from poster history, borrowing the power of past ideology while crafting new meanings.

Over the next few weeks, we will be highlighting five historic protests and some of their posters. These protests date back more than 100 years, their posters indicating that we are still demonstrating for the same struggles today.