The illustrator and SVA faculty member’s fall 2025 poster for the College doubles as a warning and a call to hope.
The fall 2025 SVA poster by artist and SVA faculty member Frances Jetter, on view in subway stations throughout New York City.
The fall 2025 SVA poster by artist and SVA faculty member Frances Jetter, on view in subway stations throughout New York City.
When Gail Anderson (BFA 1984 Media Arts), chair of BFA Advertising and BFA Design and creative director of SVA’s in-house design studio, the Visual Arts Press, reached out to BFA Comics and BFA Illustration Frances Jetter with the message reading “It’s SVA poster time!”, the faculty member and illustrator’s excitement shot through the roof.
Since its earliest days, the College has enlisted acclaimed artists and designers on its faculty to create original works for its long-running series of posters displayed in New York City’s subway stations. Part advertising campaign, part ongoing public-art project, SVA’s subway posters have inspired generations of New Yorkers to pursue their creative dreams and have been exhibited in museums and other venues around the world.
The fall 2025 SVA poster by artist and SVA faculty member Frances Jetter.
The fall 2025 SVA poster by artist and SVA faculty member Frances Jetter.
For her contribution, Jetter—best known for her politically charged drawings, sculptures, prints, and books—created a linocut of writer George Orwell, famous for his warnings about fascism and authoritarianism, with the tagline, “Art illuminates dark times.”
Jetter first encountered Orwell’s work when she read his novel 1984 (1949) as a seventh grader. The book’s ideas and imagery transfixed her. “The glass paperweight with the tiny coral—‘a little chunk of history they’ve forgotten to alter’—was so poignant,” she says. Her SVA poster transforms that fragile object into a crystal ball that presents an ominously fiery vision of the future.
“Orwell was a seer for our own time,” she said, discussing his “warnings about the corruption of language and the destruction of thought.”
The fire within Jetter’s crystal ball alludes to book burnings and the deliberate erasure of history—acts that Orwell predicted with startling accuracy. “I imagined him predicting that his own books would be burned in the future,” she says. Money, too, is swallowed by the flames, a signal that authoritarianism eventually consumes a society’s culture and economy alike.
“It’s comforting to know that most of my fellow subway riders already know we’re living in dark times,” Jetter says, though she hopes her poster, like its inspiration, also imparts a message of resilience. “If you read the appendix of 1984, it’s narrated from the future—and it’s not written in Newspeak. That means there’s hope.”
Jetter’s fall 2025 SVA poster is on view on subway platforms across New York City through October.
