Steve Walters

Jay Ryan

Flatstock
When Fri 7/13, 5 to 10 PM, Sat 7/14 and Sun 7/15, noon to 10 PM
Where Pitchfork Music Festival, Union Park, Ashland between Washington and Lake
Price Free with Pitchfork admission (festival sold out)
Info info@americanposterinstitute.com

Posters Schmosters
When Reception Fri 7/13, 6 to 10 PM. Open Saturdays 7/14-8/4, noon to 6 PM or by appointment.
Where Butcher Shop, 1319 W. Lake
Price Free
Info 773-517-9520

YOU MAY NOT think of yourself as an art collector, but if you’re one of those people who carefully pries the staples out of the gig poster as soon as the band’s started playing, you just might be. The difference between a silk-screened concert poster and an art print made using the same humble technique can be pretty negligible—what it comes down to, as local screen printer Dan Grzeca puts it, is that “for some reason when you don’t have a band name on there, it’s more expensive.”

Screen printing, as another local artist, Rob Doran, notes, “is for the proletariat.” Not only is it cheap to buy, but it’s easy to learn and inexpensive to do. Chicago’s local screen-printing scene is extremely healthy—tons of bands plus relatively affordable studio space equals lots and lots of poster work. But there’s something else going on too, a camaraderie and collegiality that foster the art. Almost every artist I talked to for this feature pointed me enthusiastically to several others—apparently they’re all in a mutual admiration club, of which the de facto president is undoubtedly Steve Walters of Screwball Press.

Walters, who started printing in 1991, has used his shop to nurture a whole community of screen printers. Many of his disciples have moved on to teach or start their own studios; in particular Jay Ryan, current vice president of the American Poster Institute and proprietor of the Bird Machine, has mentored many younger artists. Anyone who goes through Walters’s six-to-eight-hour Screwball Academy program can continue to use the space to print in perpetuity—and several of the established names here still do.

Though this roundup of 17 artists and studios isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, it’s a representative sample of this thriving community. You can see more work by many of them this weekend at two big screen-printing shows: artists from all over the country, including a handful from Chicago, will have gig posters for sale at Flatstock 13, a poster convention hitched to the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park (see our comprehensive guide), and an overlapping group of artists will be featured at “Posters Schmosters,” a companion exhibit of noncommercial work opening Friday at the Butcher Shop. “I know it sounds hokey,” says Ryan, “but as we become more and more bombarded by perfectly Photoshopped ads and shiny Web pages, e-mails, magazines, and newspaper inserts, I think people are beginning to appreciate even more the fact that here in this screen-printed poster is an image created imperfectly by a person who left their fingerprints and a couple smudges in the ink.”

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