Haight Street Art Center is proud to participate in this growing Northern California tradition, one of the country’s premier music, art and food & drink festivals. This is the second year that the Center has presented BottleRock fans with a chance to experience the ground-breaking poster art that has been such a vital part of the San Francisco arts landscape since the 1960s.
This year, Haight Street Art Center is proud to feature the work of three nationally known artists: Courtney Callahan, Gary Houston, and Chris Shaw. Together, their work defines nearly five decades of the rock poster and continues to set a standard for public art that challenges, inveigles, and celebrates the humanity and vision that informs all great creative efforts.
The work behind that effort is what the Center is showcasing this year, providing a glimpse of how these three artists work. Each artist will create, live and on site, a unique hand-printed poster commemorating BottleRock 2016, to be given away to festival-goers in the grand tradition of the San Francisco dance halls of the 1960s.
Friday – May 27, 2016
Chris Shaw has created hundreds of posters since the mid-1980s using a myriad of styles and techniques, from hand-inked illustrations to deeply layered digital collages. His work is known for pioneering innovative methods that combine traditional for- mats with the most recent production developments. His clients include the Fillmore and numerous bands and venues around the world, and his paintings and posters have been featured in shows and galleries across the country and Europe.
Saturday – May 28, 2016
Courtney Callahan is known for his screen-printed rock posters. A graduate of the University of New Mexico, Callahan cofounded the Psychic Sparkplug artists’ collective with Chuck Sperry, Ron Donovan, Orion Landau and Stew, credited with sparking the revival of screen-printed rock concert posters in San Francisco. In 1995 Callahan launched the Lucky Mule, specializing in fine t-shirt printing and poster art in his Oakland, California studio.
Sunday – May 29, 2016
Gary Houston’s Portland-based Voodoo Catbox is considered one of the country’s top illustration companies. His hand-pulled posters are created with traditional methods like scratchboard and hand-cut rubylith. His work has been commissioned by cultural institutions like the Portland Art Museum and venues like the Crystal Ballroom, as well as dozens of bands. Houston’s client roster is a who’s-who of the music world, from the Grateful Dead to Robert Cray.
Haight Street Art Center
Haight Street Art Center is the San Francisco home for rock poster art, celebrating the art form’s rich history and deep roots. The Center’s ambitious mission serves both artists and the public, presenting a forum where artists can produce their work and the public can learn about, experience, and appreciate what this vibrant, democratic genre of public art has meant in the past, and continues to mean today.
Opening this fall in San Francisco, at the historic entrance to the Haight-Ashbury, the Center will be home to an active artists’ studio and production facility coupled with fine art exhibition galleries. More than just a working museum, the Center not only immortalizes a great American art form but also fosters its preservation and continued relevance by providing traditional production facilities such as silkscreen, woodcut and lithography, as well as innovative, cutting- edge digital production capabilities.
As cofounder Roger McNamee explains, “Our goal is to make the Haight Street Art Center the hub of rock poster art, providing artists and the community with a forum for producing great contemporary art and for appreciating the history and heritage—as well as the future—of this great American art form.”
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