Posters: stories from the V&A collection

Posters litter our everyday lives and collective cultural memories, making them a rich and compelling form of art and design. This is a blog about working with the V&A’s extraordinary collection of posters. I’ll be covering exhibition projects and events, new acquisitions and current bits of research. I’ll also be linking to interesting poster projects elsewhere and asking a range of guest bloggers to contribute. The collection is international in scope and spans themes of commerce, culture and politics. The V&A was the first major museum to collect posters, acquiring its first examples over a century ago. It remains very much a live collection that we continue to add to and update.  

 

'People watched for these quaint and dashing conceits'

Friday, October 19, 2012 - 14:53
During the past year I have been involved in a project to clear copyright permissions for posters in the Schreyer Collection. As well as involving research to identify rights holders; this work has given me the enviable opportunity to open drawers and boxes – allowing me to see many of the designs. Some of my favourite posters are those produced by literary publishing companies during the...
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Poster depicting woman standing in profile with a parasol

Collect London 2012: a few more of your images

Monday, August 6, 2012 - 18:13
So many great images have been contributed to the Collect London 2012 project (see last post) that I couldn't resist putting a few more on the blog. Have a look at the Flickr group and add your own images from the last two weeks. The aim is to create an archive of photos that will preserve a snapshot of some of the more peripheral visual aspects of the London Games: Olympic-related signage,...
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Collect London 2012

Wednesday, August 1, 2012 - 22:21
We need your images for this project! Conversations with colleagues in recent weeks have turned to the question of how do you 'collect' the Olympic Games? In terms of graphics, there are certainly individual bits of printed design (posters, tickets and so on) from the London 2012 Games that can and should be accessioned by a museum of art and design.  But for an event so...
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Large 'Inspire a generation' banner

Olympic Protest

Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - 19:41
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

Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - 19:37
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

Wednesday, July 25, 2012 - 19:36
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

Friday, July 20, 2012 - 15:42
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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