Hangar 18

includ­ing The Firehouse-Goldenvoice Poster Series

An auburn-haired songstress holds a fawn. Shock­ing magenta hair falls to the shoul­ders of a blue nude strapped with artillery. A 1950s-model cop car rests peace­fully at the bot­tom of the sea, washed in blues and pur­ples reveal­ing a silent white angel. Each out­stand­ing print on dis­play rep­re­sents a promi­nent rock band. Each was cre­ated by Chuck Sperry.

In early 2011, Chuck Sperry, San Fran­cisco artist and co-owner of Fire­house Kus­tom Rockart Com­pany, made an unprece­dented dona­tion to the Library’s Art, Music and Recre­ation Depart­ment of over one hun­dred lim­ited edi­tion, hand-printed rock art posters. Offi­cially enti­tled, The Chuck Sperry Archive, this col­lec­tion com­pre­hen­sively doc­u­ments the Gold­en­voice Music Series (at the Regency and Warfield The­aters) from 2008 to present, as well as selected Fire­house pro­duc­tiv­ity related to the cultural-life of San Francisco.

This col­lec­tion is excit­ing in both use of color and vari­ety of con­tent. Each silkscreen print is com­prised of up to six­teen col­ors, applied as indi­vid­ual lay­ers. The pieces ref­er­ence styles rang­ing from Japan­ese nishiki-e, Aus­trian Expres­sion­ism, 1960s psy­che­delia, to the provoca­tive punk poster tra­di­tion of Sperry’s youth.  Musi­cians such as Neko Case, Danzig, Bad Reli­gion, Nick Cave, Soundgar­den and The Black Keys are rep­re­sented, as are a tal­ented group of Bay Area graphic artists (Ron Dono­van, Alex Fis­cher, Gregg Gor­don, John Howard, Dave Hunter, Alan Hynes, Scott John­son, Den­nis Loren, Chris Shaw, Frank Zio, & Zoltron) who con­tributed to the Fire­house Gold­en­voice Poster series under the art direc­tion of Chuck Sperry.

High Vol­ume Open­ing Recep­tion

Thurs­day, Octo­ber 20th from 6–7 pm
Latino/Hispanic Room A & B

High Vol­ume will be on dis­play at the San Fran­cisco Pub­lic Library
Octo­ber 7^th, 2011 – Jan­u­ary 6^th, 2012 on the 4th floor.

Artist Chris Shaw stopped by Hangar 18 last week to print his killer Pub­lic Enemy poster with Chuck Sperry for the August 19, 2011 con­cert at the Regency Ball­room in San Fran­cisco, CA. This poster is #139 in the Firehouse-Goldenvoice series.

Chris will have these posters and vari­ant edi­tions drop­ping at a ran­dom time on his web­site this fri­day. Full poster details at chrisshawstudio.com

Ron Dono­van, Chris Shaw, & Chuck Sperry

June 11, 2011 — Jan­u­ary 12, 2012

Bay Area rock poster art con­tem­po­raries Chris Shaw, Chuck Sperry, and Ron Dono­van stand out amongst their pre­de­ces­sors in the Bay Area tra­di­tion of poster mak­ing that spans nearly 50 years. Through their pro­lific bod­ies of work, the mas­ter­ful artists have brought inno­va­tion, inven­tion, and new mean­ing to this art form. Each dis­tinc­tively fuses pro­pa­ganda, imagery, text, and his­tor­i­cal art ref­er­ences with Pop and rock-poster art sen­si­bil­i­ties to cre­ate acces­si­ble, relat­able imagery that is at once empow­er­ing and unde­ni­ably populist.

Minna Street windows

A col­lab­o­ra­tive art work involv­ing three indi­vid­u­ally cre­ated win­dow instal­la­tions, Dono­van, Shaw, and Sperry layer silkscreen, paint­ing, col­lage, and mixed media to trans­form two-dimensional imagery into three-dimensional expres­sion. Show­ing rev­er­ence for man’s com­mu­nica­tive nature, they ref­er­ence the renewal of the idea that art has a purpose.

Natoma Street win­dows - Tem­po­rally Bound

Tem­po­rally Bound is a “visual impro­vi­sa­tion” between Sperry and Shaw. Its form is drawn from the Asian accordion-style bound scroll to rec­og­nize the Pacific Rim as the gath­er­ing cen­ter of the art world and to empha­size post­mod­ern appro­pri­ated mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. Sperry and Shaw express a real­iza­tion of the tem­po­ral, time-punctuated nature of street and poster art. By bind­ing the pan­els together in mon­u­men­tal book form, the artists cre­ate a visual record of events through a modal­ity of time. Addi­tion­ally, through bind­ing inven­tion, the con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of visual imagery, and a reas­sign­ing of rep­re­sen­ta­tional mean­ing, the artists trans­form ephemeral events and expe­ri­ences by cre­at­ing a lex­i­con of a shared cul­tural visual memory.

The “Win­dows Pro­gram” uses the SFMOMA Garage’s street-level win­dows located at 150 Natoma and 147 Minna Street (between Third and New Mont­gomery Streets) to show­case art­work. The pro­gram, orga­nized  by Renée de Cos­sio of the Artists Gallery, invites some of the area’s most ambi­tious artists to trans­form these every­day spaces into com­pelling exhi­bi­tions that the passerby can view round the clock.