About Poster House
Mission and History
Poster House is dedicated to presenting the impact, culture, and design of posters, both as historical documents and methods of contemporary visual communication.
Through temporary exhibitions, a growing permanent collection, and educational events, Poster House explores the enormous impact of posters on society and culture, and how they have been adapted to contemporary use. As the first poster museum in the United States, Poster House provides a space for inquiry for all those interested in design, advertising, and public interventions, with the aim of improving design literacy among the general public.
Posters explore:
- mass communication and persuasion
- the intersection of art and commerce
- control of the public domain
Poster House was founded in 2015 with an eye towards filling a long-acknowledged gap in the New York cultural landscape for accessible art and design. After several years of planning and construction, Poster House opened its doors on June 20, 2019.
Poster House is proud to receive support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Poster House is an affiliate member of the International Vintage Poster Dealers Association.
People
The CMYK Council is a volunteer advisory board of creatives, designers, and educators who provide feedback and work on Poster House programming.
Founding Members
Our Founding Members supported us from the very beginning, becoming a part of the Poster House Family before we even opened our doors. We are incredibly pleased to recognize their generosity and commitment.
The Building
119 West 23rd Street was built around 1901 by The National Cloak Company. At ten stories, the building was quite tall for its day, and housed several publishing firms, including George Routledge & Sons.
Later in the 1920s, stationers and mail-order companies moved into 119, followed by novelty manufacturers around the 1950s. But today, the building is best known for being the former home of Tekserve (1987–2016), an Apple repair store that was iconic to New Yorkers for its jam-packed decor and unparalleled service.
In 2018, LTL Architects took on the gut-renovation of the almost 15,000 square foot space over two floors. The design considers that posters are intended for the street, and uses the length of the space to evoke a sidewalk, playing with industrial materials. Gesturing to the space’s history, the design incorporates several existing features including the exposed brick walls, barrel vaults and cast-iron columns. These elements create a dialogue with the new architecture, blending old and new, playful and serious, and embody an embrace of the poster’s unique identity as both commerce and art, public information and cultural artifact.
About LTL Architects
LTL Architects (Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis) is an award winning, design-intensive architecture firm founded by Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J. Lewis, and is located in New York City. LTL engages a diverse range of work, from large scale academic and cultural buildings to interiors and speculative research, realizing inventive solutions that turn the constraints of each project into the design trajectory, exploring opportunistic overlaps between space, form, and materials. LTL Architects was inducted in 2019 to Interior Design’s Hall of Fame.