The most eagerly awaited event in the editorial cycle at TIME Magazine is always the selection of the cover. The best covers capture the zeitgeist of the week while surviving the judgment of history. As browsing this collection of TIME cover art prints shows, TIME is as good a record as any of who and what mattered over the past 80-plus years. And so when TIME captures a person, an event or a trend within its iconic red borders, the magazine is adding that extra dose of significance that no other publication can quite match. That is one reason why the original artwork for more than 800 TIME covers now resides in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Thanks to an amazing roster of artists, photographers and graphic designers, from TIME's earliest charcoal drawings of cover subjects to its later black-and-white photography to the more recent paintings and stunning color photography, TIME covers have always been, sometimes quite literally, works of great art. And, while the times may change, the TIME cover, with its iconic red border, has never lost its power to immediately send the signal that this person or event or idea is important to our lives, that in some way history is being made before our eyes.
