Seymour Chwast was born in New York City and is a graduate of The Cooper Union, where he studied illustration and graphic design. He is a founding partner of the celebrated Push Pin Studios, whose distinct style has had a worldwide influence on contemporary visual communications. Chwast is the director. Chwast’s clients have included leading corporations, advertising agencies and publishing compan
ies both here and abroad. His designs and illustrations have been used in advertising, animated films, corporate and environmental graphics, publications, posters, packaging and record covers. He created background images for the production of Candide at Lincoln Center in New York, and The Philadelphia Opera Company production of The Magic Flute. He has designed and illustrated over thirty children’s books and has developed several typefaces. Chwast published “The Push Pin Graphic,” a magazine with subscribers all over the world. A book entitled The Push Pin Graphic was published by Chronicle Books which also published his book “Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast”. With Steven Heller, he formed Pushpin Editions, which has produced books on the arts and graphic design. His designs and illustrations have been exhibited in major galleries and museums in the United States, Europe, Japan, Brazil and Russia. Chwast and Push Pin were honored at the Louvre in Paris in a two-month retrospective exhibition titled The Push Pin Style. He has had several one-man shows of his paintings, sculptures and prints in this country. His posters are in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The Cooper-Hewitt Museum of The Smithsonian Institution, The Library of Congress, The Gutenberg Museum and The Israel Museum among others. The American Institute of Graphic Arts awarded him the medal for 1985. He has an honorary Ph.D in Fine Arts from the Parsons School of Design and the Rhode Island School of Design and is in the Art Directors Hall of Fame. He lives in New York with his wife, The Graphic designer and painter, Paula Scher.
