The faculty member and alumnus’s introspective poster, her first for the College, is now on view in the city’s subway stations.
The summer 2025 SVA poster by artist, alumnus, and faculty member Teresa Fasolino.
The summer 2025 SVA poster by artist, alumnus, and faculty member Teresa Fasolino.
Each season, New York City straphangers are invited to engage with the work of SVA artists via the College’s long-running series of posters designed for display in the city’s subway stations. For this summer’s installment, the assignment went to artist and Art History and BFA Illustration faculty member Teresa Fasolino (Illustration 1968).
For Fasolino, the invitation came as both a shock and a delight. “Out of the blue,” she says, “I received an email from Gail Anderson,” a BFA 1984 Media Arts graduate, chair of SVA’s BFA Advertising and BFA Design departments, and creative director of the Visual Arts Press, the College’s in-house design studio. “[She said that] President David Rhodes wanted me to do the next SVA poster. This was such a surprise and an honor, since my admiration for the series goes back to when I was a student at SVA.”
That sense of memory and wonder—and of returning to one’s roots—pervades her painting, which depicts a tranquil, almost mystical view of New York City at twilight, observed through the curious eyes of a cat perched at a window.
“I had a narrative in mind of a magical view of New York City in the evening,” Fasolino says. “Since SVA is so much a part of New York, something uplifting on the need for art, artists, and imagination in difficult times felt right.”
Teresa Fasolino’s summer 2025 SVA poster, on view at the 135th Street B/C subway station in Manhattan.
Teresa Fasolino’s summer 2025 SVA poster, on view at the 135th Street B/C subway station in Manhattan.
Fasolino found inspiration for her poster during a visit last year to the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The image of a cat gazing across the rice fields with Mount Fuji in the distance left a lasting impression. “I decided to use a cat as the observer and stand-in for the artist,” she says. “Besides, I like painting animals, and everyone loves cats.”
“A viewer can take away whatever they want to see in the image,” she says. “The painting is mysterious enough to let them complete the thought.”
One subway rider proved just how powerful that elusiveness can be. “I received a lovely DM on social media from a young man who saw the poster and wrote that, ‘It was beautiful enough to make me stop, and brought a tear to my eye,’” she says.
Fasolino’s work has appeared in outlets like Esquire, The New York Times, and Playboy; in projects for the United States Postal Service and State Department; and at venues like the New-York Historical Society, Norman Rockwell Museum, and Smithsonian National Postal Museum.