During the pandemic lockdown, School of Visual Arts faculty member Peter Hristoff taught an online drawing class.

As students drew a model holding tulips to his mouth, very much like a trumpet or a bugle, he was doing the same. That drawing was the inspiration for Hristoff's subway poster.

"I think that there is something that the poster implies that is kind of heralding something good, good news, something better to come," Hristoff said.

What You Need To Know

  • “Underground Images: A History” is an exhibition at the School of Visual Arts' Chelsea Gallery

  • It features more than 200 posters from the college's iconic Subway Posters collection

  • The posters have been featured on the walls of subway stations for almost 75 years

  • It's the first-ever comprehensive retrospective for the subway posters collection to be exhibited in New York City

Hristoff's poster is one of more than 200 from the college's subway posters collection. The posters have been covering station walls around the five boroughs for 75 years.

It's all part of an exhibition at SVA's Chelsea Gallery called “Underground Images: A History.”

SVA, then known as Cartoonists and Illustrators School, commissioned the posters from some of its most esteemed faculty members as a marketing campaign with an extra artistic flair.

"They grab you by the lapels and shake you up, and make you look, and so it's been a very successful campaign that way," said Francis Di Tommaso, director of SVA Galleries.

The exhibition brings together the complete series of works from 93 artists, including Milton Glaser, who created the “I Love New York” logo and the post-9/11 follow-up on one of the posters which says, “I Love NY More Than Ever,” with a stain covering part of the familiar heart logo.

Hristoff, who was born in Turkey and raised in Queens, has been affiliated with SVA for almost all of the past 47 years. He said creating one of the posters was something he hoped to do when he first walked into the school as a student in the mid-1970s.

"They function, certainly, in a way as public art in the subways, but also for the community, for the students, they are actually something that we look up to, to a kind of possibility in the art world, whether you are a designer, an illustrator, a fine artist or photographer," Hristoff said.

Visitors can check out every one of them at the gallery through Oct. 14, and admission is free.

Plan your visit at sva.edu/about/exhibitions.