Hints of the 52nd New York Film Festival loom Wednesday as the Film Society of Lincoln Center unveiled the official poster for the event taking place September 26 - October 12.
Designed by Laurie Simmons, this year's poster joins a stellar lineage of of designs by prominent artists. NYFF has featured posters designed by prominent artists including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, and last year’s artist, Tacita Dean. Considered an annual artistic "signature" for the festival, NYFF posters have taken on a celebrated pop culture significance through the years. Recently, the Saul Bass 1964 NYFF poster has been seen prominently on AMC’s Mad Men.
Laurie Simmons is an internationally recognized artist who stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies, and costumed dancers as “living objects,” animating a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s memories, longings, and regrets. Her photographic works are collected by many institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim as well as The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Tate Modern, Walker Art Center and the Hara Museum, Tokyo.
Simmons’ first film, The Music of Regret (2006), extends her photographic practice to performance, incorporating musicians, professional puppeteers, Alvin Ailey dancers, Hollywood cinematographer Ed Lachman, and actress Meryl Streep. She has received many awards, including the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome (2005); and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984). She has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Baltimore Museum of Art (1997); San Jose Museum of Art, California (1990); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1987); and she has participated in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions in 1985 and 1991 as well as the 2013 Venice Biennial.
Simmons' 2014 solo exhibitions include “Kigurumi, Dollers and How we See,” at Salon 94, New York, and “The Fabulous World of Laurie Simmons” at Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Wilkinson Gallery, London; Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera, New York; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; The Gothenburg Museum, Sweden and Koyama Gallery, Tokyo. In 2006 she made her first film, She was recently shortlisted for the Prix Pictet Award in photography. The nominated works are being exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Currently, she is working on her second film, a narrative feature titled My Art. Simmons lives and works in New York.
[The poster will be available for purchase during the New York Film Festival (September 26 – October 12) at the merchandise kiosk in Alice Tully Hall, the Film Society of Lincoln Center merchandise store located in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, and at the Walter Reade Theater concession stand. Posters are $25; Film Society members receive a special discount for purchase.]
The complete list of NYFF poster artists follow:
Larry Rivers, 1963
Saul Bass, 1964
Bruce Conner, 1965
Roy Lichtenstein, 1966
Andy Warhol, 1967
Henry Pearson, 1968
Marisol (Escobar), 1969
James Rosenquist, 1970
Frank Stella, 1971
Josef Albers, 1972
Niki de Saint Phalle, 1973
Jean Tinguely, 1974
Carol Summers, 1975
Allan D’Arcangelo, 1976
Jim Dine, 1977
Richard Avedon, 1978
Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1979
Les Levine, 1980
David Hockney, 1981
Robert Rauchenberg, 1982
Jack Youngerman, 1983
Robert Breer, 1984
Tom Wesselmann, 1985
Elinor Bunin, 1986
Sol Lewitt, 1987
Milton Glaser, 1988
Jennifer Bartlett, 1989
Eric Fischl, 1990
Philip Pearlstein, 1991
William Wegman, 1992
Sheila Metzner, 1993
William Copley, 1994
Diane Arbus, 1995
Juan Gatti, 1996
Larry Rivers, 1997
Martin Scorsese, 1998
Ivan Chermayeff, 1999
Tamar Hirschl, 2000
Manny Farber, 2001
Julian Schnabel, 2002
Junichi Taki, 2003
Jeff Bridges, 2004
Maurice Pialat, 2005
Mary Ellen Mark, 2006
agnès b., 2007
Robert Cottingham, 2008
Gregory Crewdson, 2009
John Baldessari, 2010
Lorna Simpson, 2011
Cindy Sherman, 2012
Tacita Dean, 2013