Yolanda Cuomo (born June 7, 1957) is an American artist, educator, and art director known for her collaborations and intuitive design work with visual and performing artists, including Richard Avedon, the estate of Diane Arbus, Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Twyla Tharp, Laurie Simmons, Donna Ferrato, Larry Fink, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sylvia Plachy, Gilles Peress, John Cohen, Paolo Pellegrin, Peter van Agtmael, Andrew Moore, and the estate of Al Taylor. Since the mid-1980s Cuomo has often collaborated on books and exhibitions with the Magnum Photos agency and Aperture.
Cuomo is the recipient of numerous awards, including the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award in 1991, 1995, and 2004, and the National Magazine Award, in 2004, from the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) for her art direction of Aperture.
Early life Yolanda Cuomo was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and was raised in West New York, New Jersey, by John Cuomo and Rosa DeGennaro, both Italian immigrants. DeGennaro took Yolanda to Saturday morning art classes when she was in the third grade. She attended Saint Joseph of the Palisades High School.
Yolanda began college at Montclair State University, where she studied fine art, before transferring to Cooper Union. At Cooper Union, Cuomo focused her fine art practice by working with the filmmaker Robert Breer and her practice in conceptual art with sculptor Hans Haacke.
Early career After graduating from Cooper Union, Cuomo began working as an Assistant Designer at Mademoiselle magazine in 1980. Mademoiselle’s Art Director, Paula Greif, introduced Cuomo to Marvin Israel, who took an interest in the young designer. In their first work together, Israel and Cuomo designed a poster celebrating the visionary work of Alexey Brodovitch for a retrospective exhibition in Paris at the Grand Palais. Israel hired Cuomo as the Art Director of the Movies magazine where she began working with many of the photographers who would later shape her career. Through Israel, Cuomo had her first opportunities to work with Richard Avedon, Gilles Peress, Deborah Turbeville, Sylvia Plachy, Hiro, and Neil Selkirk, among others.
In 1983, while working at the Movies, Cuomo was asked by Laurie Simmons to design a book of her photographs from the series In and Around the House. In the early 1980s, Cuomo was the Associate Art Director at Vanity Fair, working closely with Alexander Liberman. At the same time, Avedon soon hired Cuomo to art-direct advertising campaigns for Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, and Calvin Klein. Later, Cuomo would collaborate with Avedon, Israel, and the dancer-choreographer Twyla Tharp, on a poster for Twyla Tharp Dance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Cuomo’s mentor, Marvin Israel, died in May 1984 while working on Richard Avedon’s exhibition of In the American West in Dallas.
In 1985 the Village Voice hired Cuomo as the Art Director for VUE (called View for the first issue), their new fashion magazine. During VUE’s short life of six issues, Cuomo hired photographers, including Nan Goldin, Larry Fink, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Gilles Peress, Richard Corman, Amy Arbus, Michael Spano, Lynn Davis, Ellen Carey, Jeremiah Dine, William Wegman, and Sylvia Plachy, to photograph fashion spreads. While on assignment for VUE, photographers were given total creative freedom. For one assignment, Nan Goldin photographed a pregnant female body builder at a Russian bath in New York City’s East Village. The image was eventually included in Goldin’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. VUE’s unconventional approach to fashion content was polarizing, which earned praise but also scorn. Radio personality Howard Stern called VUE "disgusting" after seeing Goldin’s photographs. David Schneiderman, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Voice, said, "An executive from one major store, whose goods grace another model in the spread, found the ladies in lace 'shocking'... I knew the magazine would be controversial, but we've built a profitable business here in the last thirty years being controversial." In fall 1986, the Village Voice dissolved VUE.
Career and artistic practice Toward the end of 1986 Cuomo founded her own studio, Yolanda Cuomo Design, on Lafayette Street. During this time, Cuomo continued working with Richard Avedon as art director for a Revlon ad campaign. The new studio’s first commercial project was a collaboration with Laurie Simmons. Together they produced Waterballet/Family Collision, bound with a lenticular 3D cover. The book was designed to be “spit-proof” because Simmons’s daughter, Lena Dunham, had just been born. The studio’s next project involved the design of a slipcase for a book of Andy Warhol’s cat drawings. Geraldine Stutz, who had helped launch Warhol’s career while Vice President at I. Miller Shoes, asked Cuomo to design a book of pre-Pop Warhol drawings and ephemera. Pre Pop Warhol was published by Stutz’s imprint at Random House, Panache Press, winning the Art Directors Club’s 68th annual award for best book of the year.
In 1987 Cuomo was hired as the creative consultant for Parents (1989), a black comedy horror film set in the 1950s suburban America, directed by Bob Balaban and written by Christopher Hawthorne. Cuomo researched and designed the sets and titles, hiring Philip-Lorca diCorcia to photograph the sets. The film opened to mediocre reviews and poor box office attendance, however, reviewers took note of the production’s attention to detail. In the New York Times, Caryn James remarked on the film’s “authentically garish costumes and sets.”
Around the same time, Cuomo began collaborating with the photographer Sylvia Plachy on the design for what would become Sylvia Plachy’s Unguided Tour. Published in 1990, the book includes photographs from Plachy’s assignments and travels as well as a vinyl record soundtrack by Tom Waits. It won the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award for best publication in 1991.
In 1988 Cuomo began sharing a studio building on West 19th Street with the photographer and master printer Neil Selkirk. Selkirk and Cuomo met through Marvin Israel while Cuomo was at the Movies. Selkirk and Cuomo would collaborate for the next twenty-five years on many projects and productions, including the books Infra-Apparel (1993), 1000 on 42nd Street (2000), See No Evil (2006), and Lobbyists (2007); the film Who Is Marvin Israel (2005) and ongoing collaborations with the estate of Diane Arbus. Selkirk is the only person ever authorized to make posthumous prints of the work of Diane Arbus.
In the late 1980s Paul Simon called Avedon because he needed someone who knew about photographs. Avedon introduced Simon to Cuomo, who began working with him on the art direction and design of his album, The Rhythm of the Saints (1990). After searching the archives of Magnum Photos, Cuomo designed the packaging, using photographs by Miguel Rio Branco for the front cover and René Burri for the back cover. Upon its release, The Rhythm of the Saints was an enormous commercial success, selling more than two million copies and going double platinum in the United States, platinum in the United Kingdom and Canada, and earning two Grammy nominations.
Cuomo’s work with Paul Simon led to collaborations with Laurie Anderson on the albums Bright Red (1994) and The Ugly One with the Jewels (1995) as well as producing promotional materials for the Songs and Stories from Moby Dick performances. Anderson was the first person to suggest that Cuomo begin designing with computers. Anderson sat Cuomo down in front of windows with a view of the Hudson River and played music while Cuomo looked through her image archives. Anderson’s music served as the catalyst for Cuomo’s designs.
In the early 1990s, Cuomo again collaborated with Twyla Tharp, this time designing Push Comes to Shove: An Autobiography (1992). Titled after Tharp’s 1976 dance work of the same name, Push Comes to Shove features many photographs by Richard Avedon, Martha Swope, James Klosty, and Lois Greenfield, among others, in addition to numerous posters designed by Israel and Cuomo.
Work with Aperture Foundation In 1992 Melissa Harris became the principal editor of Aperture magazine, ushering in more than two decades of collaboration on the magazine, as well as books and exhibitions. Harris and Cuomo had first worked together on Jean Pigozzi’s A Short Visit to Planet Earth (1991), a book of photographs that Mick Jagger wrote, “shows us an inside view of the world of flesh, food, celebrities, and dogs that most paparazzi can only dream about. . . He has recorded moments of my life that I was barely aware were happening, usually with great humor.”
Harris and Cuomo collaboratively produced numerous monographs, including Sylvia Plachy’s Goings On About Town and Self Portrait with Cows Going Home; Nick Nichols’s Earth to Sky; Donna Ferrato’s Love and Lust; Dona Ann McAdams’s Caught in the Act; Dario Fo’s Artful Laughter; Luca Babini’s Francesco Clemente: A Portrait; Luigi Ghirri’s It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It . . .; and Letizia Battaglia’s Photographs of Sicily.
In 2008, Harris and Cuomo collaborated on Josef Koudelka’s exhibition “Invasion 68 Prague” which opened at Aperture Gallery to mark the fortieth anniversary of the invasion that ended the Prague Spring. The exhibition featured more than seventy large black and white photographic prints, as well as posters from that era. In August 1968, Koudelka waded into the streets documenting Prague’s turmoil as Soviet tanks overran the city. Koudelka’s negatives were smuggled out of the country, eventually distributed by Magnum Photos under the pseudonym “unknown Czech photographer” for the next sixteen years. Koudelka personally selected the images for the exhibition from his archive. The show later traveled to Washington, D.C.; Mexico City, Mexico; Hamilton, NY; Miami, FL; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Tokyo, Japan; Moscow, Russia; Charlottesville, VA; and São Paulo, Brazil.
In addition to these book and exhibition projects, Cuomo art-directed more than thirty issues of Aperture magazine between 1992 and 2002.
Diane Arbus: Untitled, Revelations, The Libraries, A Chronology In the early 1990s Cuomo began what has thus far been a two-decade-long collaboration with Doon Arbus on books and exhibitions of the photographs of Diane Arbus. Cuomo and Doon Arbus, Diane Arbus’s elder daughter, assembled Untitled (1995), the third volume of Arbus’s work and the only one devoted to a single project, from contact sheets of previously unpublished photographs taken at residences for the intellectually disabled between 1969 and 1971. Untitled was not only an exposé of unknown photographs with a common throughline, but was meant to encourage a more complicated assessment of Arbus’s work.