Nancy Sharon Collins Design Collection

Collection

Identifier: Collection 84

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

The Nancy Sharon Collins Design Collection contains materials created and collected by Collins throughout her career as a stationer and graphic designer. It consists of Collins’ own personal work including commissions from Estée Lauder and MOMA as well as an extensive collection of xerox type specimens for research and project development. The collection also includes materials such as letterpress artists' books and chapbooks, style guides from Nickelodeon, product samples from specialty engravers, letterpress broadsides, and ephemera.

Dates

1917-2017

Creator

Collins, Nancy Sharon (Person)

Conditions Governing Access

The collection is open for research use.

Conditions Governing Use

Physical rights are retained by the J. Edgar and Louis S. Monroe Library, Loyola University New Orleans. Copyright is retained in accordance with U.S. Copyright Laws.

Biographical / Historical

Graphic designer and stationer Nancy Sharon Collins (née Feldman) was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1954. She received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1976 and MFA in Design from the Hartford Art School in 1978. Collins moved to New York in 1978 where she designed newsletters for the New Museum and later worked as an assistant for the fashion photographer Gösta Peterson. Collins also served as an Art Director for Grey Advertising before developing her own business designing for commercial clients through Nancy Feldman Studio. In 1997, the Studio split into another company called Nancy Sharon Collins, Stationer, LLC.

As sole proprietor of Feldman Studio, her responsibilities included management, design, art direction, production, and account services, creating identity systems, collateral, packaging, catalogs, advertising and promotion, point of sale displays, and signage programs. Collins' clients included the Metropolitan Opera Shop, The Museum on Modern Art Store, Estée Lauder, Liz Clairborne, Vera Wang, Williams-Sonoma, and Bergdorf Goodman. Collins' bespoke, hand engraved social stationery has been featured in Forbes, Town & Country, VOGUE, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Martha Stewart, NPR, and WWNO.

Collins taught graphic design history and typography as a visiting professor of graphic design at Loyola University New Orleans from 2007-2008 and adjunct design courses for several years thereafter. Between 2008-2013, she organized the recording of 18 oral histories from local graphic design professionals, which are housed at the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History and Louisiana State University. She is also the author of The Complete Engraver: Monograms, Crests, Ciphers, Seals, and the Etiquette of Social Stationery (2013).

From 2005 to 2015, Collins served on the executive board of AIGA New Orleans Chapter. AIGA is the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design. She was also a founding member of ABC (Artist Book Collection), a small non-profit library of artist books that was donated to the University of New Orleans Library in 2024. In 2016 she began Letters Read. Originally a live reading series in which local performers interpret written documents centering on communities in New Orleans. As of March, 2020, it is both live performance and podcast.