Hatch Show Me Love

(aka Holy Shit It's a Post About Posters!)



The first rock concert poster I ever bought was a White Stripes print of two adorable Asian cartoon karate kids against a geometric red, white and black background. The poster was designed by rock screenprint legend, Frank Kozik (though if you didn't know it you'd never guess, it's way too cutesy), and though that meant nothing to me when I purchased it in 2002, in 2008 all I can think about when I look at it is how Kozik's signature was most likely cropped and discarded when the dumbfuck at the framing place on Newbury Street cut the print to fit it in a standard frame. It's totally possible the poster I bought was a fake - I did purchase it on eBay - but the quality of the ink leads me to believe otherwise. I may never know if the piece is authentic, but my very first poster is still much loved and hanging on the Jones family walls (now at Raquel's new place):


Frankie, did you sign me?

The second rock concert poster I ever bought was also a White Stripes print, purchased at show I attended in Boston (I believe at the Orpheum Theater). The print had such a homegrown, familiar feel to it, a welcome departure from the slick, posed photograph band posters so popular in college dorm rooms. It lived in my Boston living room for one year, and it wasn't until the end of my senior year of college, at the tail end of a feature writing project I was doing on rock concert poster art, that I walked up to the poster, took a look at the tiny imprint beneath the bottom border and exclaimed, "Holy shit, this is a Hatch Show Print!"


My first Hatch Show in it's old UWS home

Hatch Show Print is rock and roll history. The oldest letterpress in the country, the shop has been handpulling bold, two and three color block printed posters since the 1920's, creating prints for everyone from Elvis and Louis Armstrong to, now, more contemporary acts like Tool and The White Stripes. Located in Nashville, TN, Hatch Show is now supported by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum (since 1992), and in addition to producing some of the most striking block printed imagery imaginable, also serves as a forum for the historic preservation of the letterpress artform.

Tonight I saw Hatch Show's Lead Designer, Jim Sherraden, who has been with the print shop since 1984, speak that the AIGA, and he was pretty freaking awesome. So awesome, he - after showing slide of an intern proofreading a poster - poked fun at a typo on the event poster produced by AIGA and frog design that the event planners had DEFINITELY not yet noticed:



To be fair, it took me 40 seconds to find it.

I found out Jim was speaking through my usual means of poster-related procrastination. I was working (or looking for new ways not to work) on a piece about poster art in New York, and found myself trolling the usual poster and design sites when I happened upon Hatch Show Print's web store, where I became instantly infatuated with a series of Monoprints Jim has been doing since 1992. For these art prints, Sherraden takes odd woodblock images and screens them over each other with slightly transparent inks in bold colors. The results are euphoric -- messy and retro in their imagery, but modern in their collaged style and potent colors. I fell murderously in love with a piece that was already sold, and when I wrote to Hatch Show inquiring if there were other pieces like it, Jim replied to me himself telling me he is always working on new stuff and that I should come see him speak in New York in February.

I could not pass up the opportunity to go to an event with screenprinted wine labels:





Sherradan opened the show with a history of Hatch, reassuring his audience that he'd run through these points many times before.

"I figure it's about three minutes a decade," he said.

The man has a sense of humor, willing to exploit himself for jokes. The first thing I noticed when I took my seat was an old school projector in the middle of the room, and of course , when picking up the remote and drawing the tangled cord out five feet to the front of the room he raised his remote arm and quipped, "Being the true luddite!" adding, "The slideshow quit being cute about two years ago." During the slideshow he also showed a picture of himself in his high school wrestling outfit, and made a comment about his "eight inch stapler."

I am on board with this man.

I am also on board with the way Hatch Show Print is run. First of all, at their new location, where they've operated since 1992, there is a 54 foot WALL OF TYPE containing all of the original wood block fonts that have become Hatch Show's calling card. The shop is a non-profit or a "working museum," as Jim calls it, and part of the responsibility of the shop in Jim's eyes is to preserve the original woodblock fonts that have been collected by the shop for the last eighty or ninety years. This is why, although Jim encourages his fellow printers/designers (the terms are one and the same at Hatch) to create new image blocks, he refuses to accept any new type carvings into Hatch, so as not to "pollute the collection." Jim also believes in preservation through production -- the woodblocks he uncovers from the archives, he feels obligated to use in new prints. A large part of his impetus for starting the Monoprint production was to employ woodblocks that lay dormant for decades beforehand. The record of the ancient craftsmanship of letterpress and woodblocking in this way comes alive on paper.

Jim also talked a lot about why there has been a resurgence of interest in Hatch Show Print over the last few years, which has been a noticeable phenomenon. The shop recently did all of CNN's posters for the California debate. The network that used touch screen maps to show election projections during the primaries, also employed a hundred-year-old letterpress shop to make their posters. (Which are AWESOME, btw.) When Finding Nemo was released, Pixar had Jim and the crew make 150 posters, one for each animator. Hand-printed posters for the kings of digital animation? Wade through the irony there. How does Jim explain the enthusiasm for his seemingly antiquated artform by even the most digitally engrossed?

"The computer is the best thing that ever happened to Hatch. We're the antiheroes of digital design," he says.

And it's true, in a world where everything is slick and digital, people are still hankering for real, raw, handcrafted art.

But Jim does admit, "times are a changing -- nobody wants the big paper up in their storefront," and that posters "have changed from being practical items to being more decorative." Most of the posters Hatch Show prints these days are resold as "concessions." But if the posters Jim sells to bands and promoters for $3 a pop are sold off for $20 at the merch stand, he doesn't seem to have a problem with it. His number one duty is to keep ol' Hatch Show and the art of letterpress alive.

If the shop continues to produce work as stunning as what was displayed on the walls tonight, I don't see how it will ever die.


My new favorite.

5 More Things I Didn't Know About Hatch Show Print Before This Evening:

1. Hatch Show Print is one of the top ten tourist sites in Nashville.
2. BB King is currently Hatch Show's most active client. He commissions about 7,000 posters a year from the print shop.
3. Hatch Show has a lot of interns, some who work for six weeks, and some for six months. Jim says he has trouble teaching interns the value of a good border (something he believes in strongly, and uses often) because they are used to the full bleed of a computer screen.
4. The print shop, quite obviously obsessed with archiving, saves three of everything made, "even wedding invitations." The fact that Hatch Show prints wedding invitations just gave me a real reason to get married.
5. Jim is hoping to focus more on the Monoprints over the next 5-10 years so he can pull neglected woodblocks (about 40% of the larger blocks filed in the shop are out of use) into the printing rotation. What this means for Miss Stacia: A buying spree is inevitable. Hopefully by the time Jim is finished I'll have some damn money.