Athens, Ga. – Steven Heller, the award-winning author of many books and articles on the history of illustration, will deliver the 10th annual Jack Davis Visiting Artist Lecture on the University of Georgia campus on Friday, March 7, at 5:30 p.m. in Lecture Hall 102 of the Student Learning Center.
The event is open free to the public and is sponsored by the Lamar Dodd School of Art in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
Steven Heller was an art director at The New York Times for 33 years, originally on the opinion-editorial page. He spent almost 30 of those years with the New York Times Book Review. Currently, he is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, special consultant to the president of SVA for New Programs and writes the Visuals column for The New York Times Book Review.
In addition to Heller’s lecture, there will be a panel discussion on humorous illustration on March 6, also at 5:30 p.m. in Lecture Hall 102 of the Student Learning Center. It is also open free to the public.
Those taking part in the panel will include Heller; Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who was the Davis Lecturer in 2007; Arnold Roth, famed cartoonist and 2004 Davis Lecturer; Anita Kunz, critically acclaimed painter, sculptor and illustrator, who was the 2000 Davis Lecturer; C.F. Payne, whose work has graced Time, Rolling Stone, Esquire and many other magazines and who was 2005 Davis Lecturer; and Jack Davis himself, legendary artist and illustrator known to generations for his work in MAD magazine and many other places.
The author, co-author and/or editor of more than 100 books on design and popular culture, Heller has worked with a score of publishers, including Chronicle Books, Allworth Press, Harry N. Abrams, Phaidon Press, Taschen Press, Abbeville Press, Thames & Hudson, Rockport, Northlight and more. He is currently completing Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State, an analysis of how the major dictatorships used graphics to propagate their ideologies for Phaidon Press.
For more than two decades he has been contributing editor to Print, Eye, Baseline and I.D. magazines and has contributed hundreds of articles, critical essays and columns (including his interview column “Dialogue” in Print) to a score of other design and culture journals.
As editor of the Aiga Journal of Graphic Design he published scores of critical and journalistic writers on design, and currently, as editor of Aiga Voice: Online Journal of Design, he continues to help build a critical vocabulary for the field.
Heller is the recipient of the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 1999, the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame Special Educators Award in 1996, The Pratt Institute Herschel Levitt Award in 2000 and the Society of Illustrators Richard Gangel Award for Art Direction in 2006.
Jack Davis is one of the best-known and most important American illustrators of the past 50 years. His work spans every genre in the illustration field from MAD Magazine to Playboy and Time.
Davis is noted for his style of wild, free-flowing brushwork, wacky characters and incredible crowd scenes. He has also received the Reuben award and was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame at the Museum of American Illustration in New York. Davis attended UGA in the early 1950s.
The intent of the Jack Davis Distinguished Visiting Artist program is to honor Davis and his contributions to popular culture and to bring outstanding professional illustrators who share in this tradition to the UGA campus for a public lecture and creative exchanges with students and faculty.
For more information or directions, e-mail artinfo@uga.edu.