Stefan Sagmeister, a celebrated designer best known for creating album covers for the Rolling Stones and David Byrne, is being feted with a major retrospective. The exhibition is a homecoming of sorts, as it is being held this fall at the School of Visual Arts in New York where he taught for many years.

The show, titled “The Masters Series: Stefan Sagmeister,” will highlight the 61-year-old artist’s contributions to design, including the groundbreaking use of his own body as a medium.

The retrospective comes as physical media for music is in decline, with streaming services accounting for the majority of music industry revenue. And while vinyl records and CDs remain popular among collectors and audiophiles, streaming’s market share has continued to grow.

Still, design quality of album covers remains high, Sagmeister said in an interview. Even he mostly chooses the albums he buys based on the quality of the cover, because “great covers very often contain great music while the opposite is not necessarily true.”

Stefan Sagmeister. AIGA Detroit (1999). Photo courtesy of Stefan Sagmeister

“I certainly see much more ebbing than flowing. Right now, the quality of vinyl cover design is very high, but the cultural importance is greatly diminished,” Sagmeister said.

In the past, when designers created covers for people like Jay-Z, the initial print run was five million. The vinyl production now is a tiny fraction of that, mostly for a specialized audience, he explained.

“There likely was never anybody greater than Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis. He has created the most iconic covers of anybody in history, including such staples as Dark Side of the Moon, Houses of the Holy and many others,” Sagmeister said, adding that he also enjoys work by Chip Kidd and Javier Jaen but is currently most influenced by artists like James Turrell, John Baldessari, Ellsworth Kelly and artists of the Cusco School.

When asked what he would like his own legacy to be, Sagmeister responded that he has been working for the past five years on a project that visualizes how humans think about things in the long-term. He said short-term media like the social media platform X and hourly news make it seem like the world is spinning out of control with democracy in peril.

The Stefan Sagmeister-designed album booklet for Bridges to Babylon by The Rolling Stones. Photo courtesy of Stefan Sagmeister.

“But if we look at developments concerning the world from a long-term perspective—the only sense-making way—almost any aspect concerning humanity seems to get better,” he said. “Fewer people go hungry, fewer people die in wars and natural disasters, more people live in democracies and live much longer lives than ever before.”

Among the most memorable moments of Sagmeister’s career is when he carved the event details for a conference of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) into his own skin and photographed it, receiving significant attention from the design world.

“I have very fast healing skin so there is no scarring left at all,” he said. “I had always loved work where the story of the making becomes part of the design… We probably could have photo-shopped that AIGA Detroit poster, rather than cutting the type in my skin. I think the results are more authentic and the process more interesting.”

The Stefan Sagmeister-designed booklet for the 1997 album “Feelings” by David Byrne. Photo courtesy of Stefan Sagmeister

Personally, Sagmeister is also proud of his “maxims” that were collectively published in a book titled “Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far.”

The artworks and designs in the book came from his diary and often took on complex typographic forms, like letters made out of 6,500 ripe and unripe bananas, which he said “seem to have had an unintended influence on the flood of typographic wisdoms that designers started to flood Instagram with about a decade later.”

Sagmeister & Walsh. Take It On (2013). Photo courtesy of Stefan Sagmeister

“Even though our work is often shown in art museums, I see everything we do as design, simply because all of it needs to have some functionality,” he said. “Pure art can just be and is not dragged down into the gutter by something as lowly as function.”

In a press release, Sagmeister mentioned it was a privilege to have the retrospective at SVA since he taught there for many years. Sagmeister expanded on that to Artnet and said being a teacher required him putting his own thoughts to words to be able to share them to students, which helped him do the same with his studio practice.

Stefan Sagmeister, Things I Have Learned So Far In My Life (2008). Photo courtesy of Stefan Sagmeister

“I remember telling my students that I just saw a little girl in the subway studying a math book where the solutions were overprinted with red X’s and she had a red filter that made those X’s disappear, which rendered the answers legible,” Sagmeister said. “I mentioned it would be interesting to see if this would also work with photography or illustration. Later I tried it out and it became the concept for a number of our projects, including our first book and a cover for Jay-Z.”

“The Masters Series: Stefan Sagmeister” will be on view from August 29 to October 12, 2024 at SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor, New York City.