Syd Mead: Illustrating the Future

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1933 and raised on a steady diet of science fiction pulps, Syd Mead, who died in 2019, is as much as any single individual responsible for shaping our collective image of the future. After graduating from art school in Los Angeles and making a name as an industrial designer and gifted artist of architectural renderings, Mead went to work for the movies, and through his concept art—for Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and its belated Denis Villeneuve sequel, for James Cameron’s Aliens—put an indelible stamp on how we now imagine Things to Come.

Celebrating the cinematic legacy of a futurist visionary par excellence, this series is timed to the Mead estate’s launch of Future Pastime—a major exhibition of his graphic works in New York that presents Mead’s original artworks outside of his cinematic contributions—and the first such exhibition ever—this series celebrates the cinematic legacy of a futurist visionary par excellence. Per curators William Corman and Elon Solo, Mead “meticulously rendered visions of the future that balance the extraordinary with the familiar. These are not distant utopias, but lived-in futures, optimistically within reach.”

“When Ridley Scott first brought Syd Mead onto Blade Runner, the ask was simple: design Deckard’s car. But Mead couldn’t just design a vehicle—he needed to understand the world it belonged to. So he visualized the architecture, the people, the clothing, the landscape, the technology, the entire culture pulsing through a future Los Angeles. The car was not merely a car—it was one fragment of a fully realized world. Mead was a world builder. A pioneer in visual futurism, he engineered entire realities with a level of precision that made them feel not only possible but inevitable, each shaped by his unparalleled ability to stretch the present gracefully forward.” —Series curators Elon Solo and William Corman