Naomi Abel

NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
Role ....................Design Director & Designer
Agency...................Pentagram
Creative Director........Michael Bierut  
Photography..............Claudia Mandlik, Kevin Kunstadt
Collaborators............Jay Wegman, Tess McCann
Published................2018The Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University is downtown Manhattan’s premier cultural center, presenting a wide variety of genres including dance, theater, music, film, and performance art.  With a new senior director, Jay Wegman, Skirball wanted to raise its profile as a cultural institution and destination for artists and audiences. In his new role, Wegman envisioned the center as a place “where uptown meets downtown,” that serves both the NYU community and New York at large, and makes the most of NYU’s global connections to present adventurous programming from around the world.

The bold, new identity system reflects the intellectual and counterculture traditions in the historically Bohemian Village. Visual cues were taken from the rich graphic heritage of downtown New York––gig posters, ‘zines, handmade flyers––to evoke the days when Washington Square was the proving ground for a revolutionary American avant-garde. Overscale graphics bomb the polite campus architecture with a bit of downtown anarchy, and the brash look and feel carries through all the other elements, including the season brochure, printed on an impromptu, ‘zine-like newsprint.  



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