Creating the Artwork for AHA26

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For each department at the AHA, planning for the next annual meeting kicks off at a different time of the year. For the marketing department, it begins with the creation of the next meeting’s artwork, a process that often starts more than a year in advance. The annual meeting artwork is featured on just about everything AHA from the time registration opens in September to when the meeting wraps in January, so getting it in hand is an exciting moment that makes the upcoming meeting start to feel real.

For previous meetings, we have contracted with an independent artist—a time-consuming process that involves identifying candidates, reviewing pitches, and communicating with the artist at every stage of the design process. This has given us the chance to feature beautiful art at the annual meetings, but sometimes comes with frustrating snags when the artwork isn’t quite to the specifications we need, or proves difficult to crop and rearrange into the many variations of graphics we need for the website, emails, social media, physical signage, and more.

To simplify the process, this year we brought the artwork in-house, and I jumped at the opportunity to create something new. In our first brainstorming session, a group of AHA staff members convened in the conference room to get to work. Debbie Ann Doyle, Jake Purcell, Hope Shannon, Liz Townsend, Sarah Weicksel, and I discussed approximately a million different approaches we could take. We threw any Chicago-related thing we could think of into the mix: jazz, baseball, deep-dish pizza, the Willis (née Sears) Tower, Navy Pier, SUE the T. rex, elevated trains, the Black press, the city’s ethnic neighborhoods, Hull-House, Mrs. O’Leary’s apocryphal cow. Because our 2025 artwork had so prominently featured New York’s iconic water towers, we considered continuing the theme by focusing on Lake Michigan and Chicago’s water cribs. I ran out of room on our brainstorming page, my handwriting getting smaller and smaller as I squeezed ideas into the margins or wrote them sideways along the page edge.

Using this overflow of ideas, I mocked up several rough artwork concepts in Adobe Illustrator, using a variety of the Chicago landmarks, cultural staples, and historical references we’d discussed. Since AHA26 would be Sarah’s first annual meeting as executive director, I made sure to include a concept inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright. Sarah, a University of Chicago alumna, is a fan of the Chicago-based architect’s work, and we all wanted to celebrate her new role at the AHA.

As a group, we reviewed the concepts and decided to combine two into something new. One was a view of the city from Ohio Street Beach: We would keep the skyline and the water but lose the lifeguard chair and beach umbrellas in the foreground, since a beachy scene might seem like a strange choice for a January event. The other was based on a mural from Midway Gardens, a Hyde Park entertainment venue Wright designed in the early 1910s. The venue lasted only a decade and a half before it closed and was demolished in 1929. Now the artwork Wright created for the project—not just the mural, but the architecture, glasswork, gardens, sculptures, furniture, and countless small ornaments—is preserved only in photographs and reproductions. Drawing inspiration from this mural seemed a fitting tribute to the city’s history of public artwork.

Over several months, I brought drafts of the artwork to the group to get fresh eyes on it: How blue should the sky be? Are the city buildings better in brown or navy? Where should the text go? As the design evolved, I incorporated a pattern inspired by Wright’s stained glass work into the background—in the AHA’s brand colors, of course.

The annual meeting artwork is always a celebration of the city the AHA is visiting. When we finally declared this year’s artwork finished, we were so excited to share it with the rest of the staff and our members. We hope to see you in Chicago so we can all explore the city together.