The Art of the Company Picnic

The fifth annual Eames Ranch Summer Picnic poster has arrived, popping with color and texture that evoke the season. But did you know that this series is part of a tradition that began in the early 20th century with a company picnic?

That’s when Herman Miller began to host its picnics in Zeeland, Michigan. By midcentury, when the company became the exclusive manufacturer of Eames furniture in the U.S., those picnics had become beloved yearly outings. They featured an abundance of summer comfort food, painting easels manned by kids in smocks, three-legged races, pie-eating contests, and other games, with prizes ranging from an Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman to a paid week of vacation.

The annual posters were inaugurated in February 1970, when Herman Miller recruited graphic designer Steve Frykholm straight out of the nearby Cranbrook Academy of Art (where, in 1939, Charles had set up the school’s first industrial design department). One of Frykholm’s first assignments was to design a poster memorializing the company’s summer picnic and honoring the workers at the heart of the brand. His use of massive scale, juicy color, and tight close-ups recruited all the viewer’s senses. They looked almost abstract, like Pop Art, and the first one went on to win an American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) competition. By 1989, Frykholm had designed 19 more posters, which are now represented in major museum collections the world over, including on permanent display at the Eames Archives.

Fast forward to 2018 when the seed of the Eames Institute was planted at the Eames Ranch in Petaluma, California. Within four years, the Institute had taken up the Herman Miller tradition⁠—both the picnicking and the postering⁠—by inaugurating its own joyously graphical series.

To create the first of the Institute’s posters in 2022, the Institute commissioned Nathaniel Russell, who used a hard-boiled egg to represent the rising sun. The egg⁠—over millennia a symbol of nature, renewal, abundance, and humor⁠—revisited a theme that the artist has played with in his own work for many years. But this particular image also honors the fact that in 1918 Petaluma was proclaimed the “egg basket of the world” with the town’s hens working overtime to produce roughly 10 million eggs per year.

Dense, dynamic, and sometimes even kinetic, artist Yolande Mutale’s work defies perfection. For the Institute’s 2023 poster. Mutale opted for a relatively simple silhouette of flowers. Vibrant and full of gentle movement, this image conveys a sense of earthiness and place.

In 2024, Brooklyn illustrator Rose Wong to design a poster around the themes of “planting seeds” and “bountiful harvest.” As part of the Institute’s ongoing experimentation with land management practices, the ranch team had commissioned a “keyhole garden” that would serve as Wong’s inspiration. Its C-shape design had originally been developed for people too ill to maintain a traditional garden. An elevated, curved layout with an integrated composting tower ensures that the planting bed remains within reach, making it more accessible and therefore more productive. Local stonemason Edwin Hamilton created the garden by carving sculptural shapes into local tufa stone. Wong’s interpretation celebrated these ideas by using fresh green tones and a cornucopia of curves.

The following year, not long after joining the Eames Institute, Creative Lead Chloe Looker was invited to create the 2024 poster. “I realized the poster had been one of Steve Frykholm’s first assignments too, when he got hired by Herman Miller in 1970,” she says. “Through his whole catalog of posters, he maintained a relationship with the same set of constraints over a period of many years. Now it’s exciting to come back to the same prompt at a different time, with different things going on in the world.”

The fifth and latest addition was also created by Looker. Before beginning to design, she walked around the Ranch in Petaluma with Senior Farm Manager David Evershed. There, she found her inspiration naturally, in every sense of the word: “I looked at what was growing in the garden and we ate some things out of the ground, which was fun,” Looker recalls. “While we were walking and chatting, I was collecting bits and bobs⁠—a feather, some leaves, stalks of tall grass, chamomile flowers⁠—and I put them in my jeans pocket to keep them safe.”

The series continues to illustrate the ongoing commitment of the Eames Institute to some of the same people-first, socially conscious values evinced by Herman Miller. It’s a tradition that celebrates nature, food, and agriculture, which are seminal to life at the Ranch. Perhaps most simply, however, Frykholm’s work shares affinities with the Eames ethos: “He was extraordinary⁠—always prototyping and iterating⁠—finding ways to be inclusive and celebratory of the human connections in a business world,” says Llisa Demetrios, Ray and Charles’s granddaughter, the Institute’s co-founder, and the Lucia Eames Chief Curator. “To have a poster commemorating the Herman Miller summer picnic as a keepsake was very special. It became an inspiration for us to have our own.” ❤

The Herman Miller posters are on display in our new Welcome Center at the Eames Archives in Richmond, California. Stay tuned: We’ll be doing a giveaway of copies of the most recent Eames Institute poster through Instagram in the coming weeks.