Posters: stories from the V&A collection

Olympic Protest

On top of a road sign near Brick Lane in London last week an unofficial street art tribute was erected to Tommie Smith - one of two black American athletes who famously used an Olympic podium at the Mexico City Games in 1968 to stage a demonstration against racial discrimination in the United States. As the American national anthem played, Smith and John Carlos (gold and bronze medallists in...
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Poster showing Olympic rings made up of corporate logos

Olympic Posters: Branding

When the Olympic Torch Relay arrived in London, the official London 2012 website declared that 'London's moment to shine is here'. Early on in the history of the modern Olympic Games host cities realised that the Games were a chance to project a message of both civic and national pride to the rest of the world. Many Olympic posters present host cities through images of skylines,...
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Poster comprised of emblems and logos

Olympic Posters: History Lessons

This is the second in a series of posts looking at Olympic posters from the V&A collection Posters are one of the objects that preserve a material memory of an Olympic Games long after the athletes and audiences have dispersed and the event is over.  There are also a number of ghost posters for Olympic Games that never happened because the weight of world events intervened. Helsinki...
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Poster showing Brandenberg gate and head of classical statue

Olympic Posters

As I sit down to write the first entry for this blog, London is buzzing with Olympic fever: there is only one day left to go before the opening of the London 2012 Olympic Games. This presents me with a perfect opening subject - especially as Olympic posters are an area of the collection that we’ve been focussing on for some time at the V&A. When London won the bid to host the London...
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Gallery view of the Olympic Poster exhibition at the National Sports Museum
Posters Blog

Catherine Flood is a curator in the Word and Image Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum specialising in posters, graphics and ephemeral print. She is the author of British Posters: Advertising Art and Activism (V&A Publishing 2012) and has also published on London Transport posters and nineteenth century print culture. She has recently set up a Subject Specialist Network for posters and is currently researching protest posters. 

Anisa Hawes is an assistant curator in the Word and Image Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has worked closely with both the Posters collections and the Photographs collections; assisting with the exhibitions Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton - A Diamond Jubilee Celebration and Light from the Middle East - New Photography

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