CONVERSATION
WHAT TO PUT ON THE COVER FOR OUR 100TH BIRTHDAY? To answer that question we reached back through the decades for inspiration. The 144 images that make up this week’s cover were drawn from the more than 5,200 that TIME has published over the past century—zoomed in to offer a new perspective on the iconic images. There’s at least one cover from each of the past 100 years, and every U.S. President since TIME’s founding. (That’s 18, to be exact, starting with Warren G. Harding on the second issue of TIME in 1923.) Richard Nixon, who holds the record for most TIME covers (55), appears four times on this commemorative cover. You will also find world leaders and sports icons; activists and astronauts; musicians, artists, authors, and actors; great thinkers, scientists, and innovative entrepreneurs. There’s a famous Thoroughbred, a green-eyed cat, and a Big Bird. The cover includes work from Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Marc Chagall and Jacob Lawrence, James Nachtwey and Jodi Bieber, Marisol Escobar and JR. And though what you see here is less than 3% of all the TIME covers published, it suggests the sweep, influence, and history the magazine captured across its first hundred years. —D.W. PINE, CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Looking back
1. Sept. 11 After “debris started raining down on us,” photographer Lyle Owerko, a resident of downtown Manhattan who happened to witness the 9/11 attacks, started walking up Broadway with the film he’d shot that morning, toward a nearby lab to process his images. He later recalled the owner telling him, “You have the cover of TIME magazine.” Owerko’s image was framed by a black border—the first time the magazine’s iconic red border had been changed since 1927.
2. Black America 1970
When TIME published a cover titled “Black America 1970,” the cover featured a portrait of civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, by Jacob Lawrence, the first Black artist to gain representation at a major New York City gallery. “I remember [when I found out] Jacob Lawrence was going to do the cover of TIME, I was just overwhelmed by the idea,” Jackson later said, noting that the portrait captured the pain and passion he felt amid the trauma of that time.
3. Her Lasting Impact For our 2018 cover story on Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, San Francisco–based artist John Mavroudis used her powerful words to create a memorable portrait. Mavroudis had one day to re-c
