Wanted Posters
The art of rock is a booming business, and many Seattle-based designers are at the forefront of the industry
by Christopher Zara
No doubt you’ve seen them—bold, eye-catching, sometimes gorgeous
announcements for local rock, punk and hip-hop shows—adorning record store walls
and swaddling telephone poles like an extra layer of skin. These days, however,
concert posters have gone from disposable advertisement to fine-art collectible.
The death of the vinyl album cover (blame CDs), coupled with the rise of
Internet music downloading, has spawned a generation of music fans hungry for
tactile concert memorabilia. Posters fill that void, and many collectors look to
Seattle for some of the genre’s top talent: Jeff Kleinsmith, Justin Hampton and
Andrio Abero are among the nationally renowned poster artists who call our city
home. “Seattle has a rich history of poster art,” says Kleinsmith. “Our music
scene has always been strong, and postering is part and parcel with that.”
Kleinsmith should know. He’s been designing posters in Seattle for 13 years,
honing his trademark style: lonely, often sullen cartoon figures amid muted
backdrops. The Oregon native is also art director for local super-label Sub Pop
Records and co-owner of Patent Pending, a local studio that designs posters for
clients ranging from Seattle rock room The Showbox to DreamWorks Records. Add to
his résumé a seat on the American Poster Institute’s board of directors, and
Kleinsmith easily shines in Seattle’s thriving poster culture. The roots of this
culture stretch back to the late ’70s and legendary local graphic designer Art
Chantry, who is credited with creating the punk poster aesthetic—a messy collage
of disparate images often produced in a decidedly low-tech manner. This style
emerged as the standard in underground music scenes around the country and
flourished during Seattle’s grunge heyday. Chantry went on to work as art
director for The Rocket, the now-defunct local music biweekly Kleinsmith cites
as having been a key springboard for many of Seattle’s successful poster
artists.
Today, the industry that Chantry pioneered is seeing commercialization through a
poster-as-commodity mind-set. Proof of this, notes longtime Seattle poster
artist Shawn Wolfe, is apparent in the proliferation of Web sites such as
GigPosters.com, a forum where poster artists from around the country can exhibit
their work. Although GigPosters itself doesn’t sell posters, interested parties
can purchase posters by directly contacting artists and dealers featured on the
site. (Depending on factors such as band and artist notoriety, and print run,
posters can cost anywhere from a few bucks to a few hundred bucks.) If all this
has you itching to pick up a memento from that White Stripes gig you missed,
don’t despair: Next month, Bumbershoot will be hosting Flatstock, a semiannual
poster show that began in San Francisco in 2002. Designers from all over the
world will join local artists to show off and peddle their attractive adverts.
And if you can’t wait till then, well, telephone poles are everywhere.