Chuck Sperry

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March 6, 2025 By squirt

Sperry Joins “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” Exhibition

My “Equal Rights, Flower of Democracy” print has widely traveled since I created it in 2021. First, it raised funds for the fight for the ERA in exhibits with Artists 4 ERA nationwide culminating in a show at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. Then, it took to the road on a voter drive in the Southern USA during midterms in 2022. Finally, it appeared at The Capitol in Washington, D.C. as a gift from US Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger to US Congresswoman Ayana Pressley, lead sponsor for the ERA in Congress.

https://chucksperry.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/clip.5015550.MP4-M20.mp4

 

Recently, I was deeply honored to have been invited to include my work in “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights”, an impactful traveling poster exhibition curated and organized by Elizabeth Resnick, Professor Emerita of Graphic Design at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.

The exhibition opens soon in Pennsylvania:

The Gallery at Penn College
Pennsylvania College of Technology, Williamsport, PA
March 17–April 17, 2026

Curator’s Statement: Women’s Rights Are Human Rights is a very fitting title for an exhibition of Women’s rights and advocacy posters, as it is a term used in the women’s rights movement and was the title of an important speech given by Hillary Rodham Clinton at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. In her speech, Hillary Clinton suggests that “If the term women’s rights were to be interchangeable with the term human rights the world community would be a better place because human rights affect the women who raise the world’s children, care for the elderly, run companies, work in hospitals, fight for better education and better health care.” 

Yet gender inequalities remain deeply entrenched in every society. Women lack access to decent work and face occupational segregation and gender wage disparities. Women are often denied access to basic education and health care, suffer from violence and discrimination, and are under-represented in political and economic decision-making processes.

This exhibition features posters created by both men and women to celebrate and acknowledge the vital role that all citizens should play in protecting and promoting human rights while actively challenging gender inequality and stereotypes, advancing sexual and reproductive rights, and protecting women and girls against brutality. In their collective visual voice, these posters promote women’s empowerment and participation in society while challenging religious and cultural norms and patriarchal attitudes that subordinate, stigmatize or restrict women from achieving their fullest potential. 

Organized and curated by:
Elizabeth Resnick, Professor Emerita, Graphic Design
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston

Equal Rights, Flower of Democracy
18 x 24
Offset Print
Open Edition

Would you like one? It’s available here:

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Artists 4 ERA, Chuck Sperry, Elizabeth Resnick, Equal Rights Amendment, Vote Equality, Women's Rights Are Human Rights

February 28, 2025 By squirt

Chuck Sperry’s “Danaide” • New Art Print Launch

Danaïde, 2025
18 x 35
Edition of 400
7 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered

On Saturday, March 1, 2025, at 9 am PST, I will open my online launches for my Danaïde art print and its variants. The launches close at Sunday, March 2 at 9 pm PST. The ballot will be open for 36 hours. As long as you enter during this timeframe, time of entry does not impact your chances of purchase.

There will be six live launches: 1 launch for each print edition (regular, silver, gold, black, sparkle, lava).

You are free to register once for each launch. Multiple entries per launch will be penalized.

You may only win 1 print from all the live launches within this twelve hour period. One per household.

Follow the link below, and you will be directed to The Chuck Sperry EQL Launches landing page – the site of my release when it goes “live”.

Visit the launch page for this weekend’s release:

JOIN EQL RELEASE

“Danaïde” wears early spring flowers and carries her terracotta amphora decorated with the winged horse Pegasus. As Pegasus stamps the earth, so bursts a spring; as Hippocrene flows on Mt Helicon, so flows inspiration from the source of the muses.

The myth of the 50 Danaïdes, condemned for all eternity to toil, to endlessly carry water to fill a leaking vessel. Sisyphus fated to bear his heavy stone uphill, only to lose his burden near the hilltop, and to begin again. 

This is our struggle for equal rights, for our democracy. To paraphrase Albert Camus: the struggle itself — to continually work to fill the leaking jar — is enough to fill her heart. One must imagine the Danaïdes happy.

Danaïde, 2025
18 x 35
Silver Edition of 25
7 colors on metallic silver paper
Signed and Numbered

Danaïde, 2025
18 x 35
Gold Edition of 25
7 colors on metallic gold paper
Signed and Numbered

Danaïde, 2025
18 x 35
Satin Black Edition of 25
7 colors on satin black paper
Signed and Numbered

Danaïde, 2025
18 x 35
Sparkle Foil Edition of 25
7 colors on sparkle foil
Signed and Numbered

Danaïde, 2025
18 x 35
Lava Foil Edition of 25
7 colors on lava foil
Signed and Numbered

Filed Under: Art Prints Tagged With: Chuck Sperry, Muse

January 31, 2025 By squirt

Edwardian Ball 2025 Poster

Edwardian Ball 2025
22 x 28
Edition of 250
3 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered

This poster is officially available at the show in SF. I will make a limited online launch of my Edwardian Ball 2025 poster through EQL opening on Monday, February 3, 2025 at 9 am PST. The launch closes on Wednesday, February 5, 2025 at 9 am PST.

Visit the launch page for the release (countdown and launch):

JOIN EQL RELEASE

It’s Edwardian Ball time again, and as always, it’s a great pleasure to work with Justin Katz, the Edwardian Ball impresario, and once again I had a lot of fun making this poster!

My Edwardian Ball posters always have an edge of social critique in them. They are done with a wink and a nod, in keeping with the enjoyment of attending such an elaborate period pageant.

Most of the attendees also realize that the Edwardian era was one of unabashed and ostentatious oligarchy, unrivaled economic imperialism and a presumed European superiority complex. It’s all of these things that makes the period so bizarre to us today. I’ve always endeavored to reveal this outrageous and bizarre sense of imperial entitlement in my Edwardian Ball posters, and keep them wild and fun.

I try to channel the spirit of our age in a non-linear way with each year’s Edwardian Ball poster, making allegory, or touching a simple parallel between our 21st Century experience and the far-away world of Edwardian “Society.” 

This year’s poster has more than an edge of social critique.

“Ladies and gentlemen, politics is not the most important thing, it’s the only thing!” – Eugène Ionesco

The far-away oligarchy of the Edwardian period is being outdone by the sinister multi-centi-billionaire, hormone-jacked, space-racing, data-driven, artificially-intelligent, techno-oligarchs of the present day. The oligarchic musings of my entire series of posters for the Edwardian Ball come into focus as a prescient warning started many, many years ago.

This year’s poster emerges from my darkest imaginings of the near future: a deadly, skeletal, imperial monarch who rules by whim and decree, conquering Greenland, and establishing his dictatorship from the Gulf of America to the Arctic Circle. 

Our potentate’s power-madness is symbolized by a scepter emblazoned with the Facebook logo. In an absurd touch, our techno-oligarch is accompanied by his royal rhinoceros draped in his ermine cloak. 

The rhino is a thematic flourish first used in my 2013 Edwardian Ball poster, and is used here as a symbolic warning based on French absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco’s play “The Rhinoceros.” 

In Ionesco’s play citizens one-by-one inexplicably turn into brute, belligerent rhinoceroses. Written in 1959 the play is largely considered to be an allegory of social degradation and slow descent into fascist politics. It’s themes mirror our present-day social degradation and growing obsession with far-right ideology. 

Today’s grandiose multi-centi-billionaire oligarchs are guided toward world domination by artificial intelligence, or as Ionesco said in his play: “Being a machine is a great way to avoid thinking.”

My 2025 poster for the Edwardian Ball was foreshadowed on January 15 by outgoing President Joe Biden’s unusually dire remarks delivered during his farewell address:

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms.”

During incoming President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Ball on the evening of January 20, five days after Biden’s warning, Trump’s multi-centi-billionaire oligarchic sidekick Elon Musk thrust a pair of nazi salutes over the crowd attending his inaugural ball. 

There, you’ve been warned.

Filed Under: Rock Posters Tagged With: Chuck Sperry, Edwardian Ball

January 9, 2025 By squirt

Thank You for Sharing an Incredible 2024 • Year In Review

Photo: Shaun Roberts

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I would like to give all my friends and supporters a heartfelt thank you for sharing an incredible 2024, full of amazing events and watershed achievements! 

2024 bore witness to San Francisco’s warm welcome of my work as I received a lifetime membership to the de Young and Legion of Honor Museums in appreciation for works which rest in their permanent collection. Additionally, the de Young and Legion of Honor Museum Stores now carry “Color x Color” – which is available at the link below. 

SIGNED Color x Color at Museum Stores

Artist Chuck Sperry at the Art of Noise exhibition at SFMOMA. May 2024. Photo: Shaun Roberts.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art brought my work into their permanent collection and showed these pieces in “The Art of Noise” exhibition through spring and summer. It’s thrilling to receive this institutional acknowledgement.

Opening reception. “Home Show” a Chuck Sperry retrospective at The Haight Street Art Center, San Francisco. On view from October 17th through November 24, 2024. Photo: Shaun Roberts.

Meanwhile, in my neighbourhood of the Haight-Ashbury I received three shows across the year: “My Minds Eye” at Psychedelic SF Art Gallery, “Home Show: A Chuck Sperry Retrospective” at the Haight Street Art Center, and The Rock Poster Society, Festival of Rock Posters which I never miss at the Hall of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. All three shows were hearty reminders of my love of the city and a celebration of the living soul of San Francisco.

Packed house at Harman Projects for Chuck Sperry’s April opening of “Only Human” in New York City.

Feeling buoyed by hometown acceptance, Harman Projects launched my exhaustive solo show “Only Human” in art capital New York City, and followed with Art On Paper NYC. It was amazing to see everyone in New York City share in such an amazing celebration!

Europe called again with “Popland 4” at KochxBos Gallery, curated by amazing French artist Ciou in Amsterdam. “Only Human” solo travelled to L’Oeil Ouvert Gallery in Paris, where Beaux Arts Magazine dubbed my show one of the top five most captivating shows in the art capital of Europe. Both shows made waves on both sides of the Atlantic.

I finished the year with a solo at L’Oeil Ouvert, Paris – “Future In The Balance” which is on view until January 31 with work available through the gallery at the link below. I’m happy to report that my solo received major attention, listing on The City of Paris’ official event website, Sortir a Paris among other notices, and even took to the airwaves on OUI FM. See the link below for my available works.

AVAILABLE WORKS at L’Oeil Ouvert, Paris

I teamed up with Vote Equality, Spoke Art and The Roxie Theater to produce a benefit screening of RATIFIED, a film documenting the struggle for ERA. My poster was made the official movie poster while this spirited and important film moves into distribution and streaming next year.

I’m thrilled my work showed with Harman Projects at CONTEXT Art Miami during Art Basel, Miami Art Week – and in appreciation of San Francisco love, a very limited Artist Edition of 100 “Home Show” posters is available now by joining Harman Projects EQL launch below.

HOME SHOW EQL LAUNCH

Also there are a very limited number of my iconic “Joy” and “Pneuma” wood panels which were shown in Miami and are available through Harman Project’s CONTEXT Art Fair exhibition viewing room – see link below.

AVAILABLE WORKS HARMAN PROJECTS AT CONTEXT

I am so very grateful for an outstanding year and the support of the museum teams, gallery teams, volunteers, friends who showed up to help carry the day, and friends and supporters who came to share and revelled in the joy and love of creative energy. I’m heartened by our human family, and encouraged by your emotion, soul, light and laughter. Here’s to 2025! Please take care of each other and assert your human spirit!

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Art Basel Miami, Art of Noise, Art On Paper NYC, Beaux Arts Magazine, Ciou, Color X Color, Context Art Fair, de Young Museum, Haight Street Art Center, Harman Projects, KochxBos, l'Oeil Ouvert, Legion of Honor, Psychedlic SF Gallery, Ratified, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, Spoke Art, TRPS, Vote Equality

November 19, 2024 By squirt

Sperry Opens Show in Paris at L’Oeil Ouvert December 14

FUTURE IN THE BALANCE
The Art of Chuck Sperry

14 December 2024 to 31 January 2025
Opening: Saturday, December 14

L’Oeil Ouvert Gallery
1 rue Lucien Sampaix
75010 Paris (metro: République)

PARIS, FRANCE: My solo exhibition “Future In The Balance” opens Saturday, December 14 and will be on view through January 31, 2025 at L’Oeil Ouvert Gallery, Paris where I will be showing new works, archive rarities, test prints and wood panels. 

“The artworks featured in the “Future In The Balance” exhibition reach for a personal politics, a deeper connection to change and evolution, by connecting with the archetypes at the foundation of our humanist experiment in democracy. I have always maintained that beauty strengthens my message. My current work has much more to do with symmetry and proportion, color and balance. It’s a utopian provocation; while the present era couldn’t be more off balance, more dystopian. I want my work to provoke meditation and emotional responses to its clear colors, balance and symmetry — to give courage, light and beauty to all of us trapped in an ugly historical moment. I think of my work from the last few years as defiant in these dark times. I like to think I give people courage through it. It gives me courage to work on it.” – Chuck Sperry

READ MORE: VILLE DE PARIS

READ MORE: SORTIR A PARIS

READ MORE: ARTS SPECTACLES PARIS

READ MORE: JDS MAGAZINE PARIS

READ MORE: SOUFFLE INEDIT

READ MORE: FP92 TV

READ MORE: PARIS JE T’AIME 

READ MORE: LOISIRA MAG FRANCE

LUXURY PLACE MAGAZINE FRANCE

LISTEN: OUI FM

Joy, 2024
20 x 30
Edition of 30
Screen print on oak panel
Signed and numbered

Informed by art historical figures such as Gustave Moreau and William Morris, combined with poetry and Greek Mythology, Chuck Sperry has cultivated a distinct style brimming with exuberance and energy. Refining his vision through his masterful printing expertise, Sperry creates ethereal and psychedelically saturated screen prints that draw crowds of dedicated fans around the world.

Creating work for musicians such as Pearl Jam, Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Patti Smith and The Black Keys in addition to his fine art screen prints on wood panel and paper, Chuck Sperry has also used his artwork for social activism and change. The artist describes his political participation – “Freedom of Speech is our most powerful weapon, and it’s a driving force in my art.”

Chuck Sperry splits his time between his home in Grasse, France and his home in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco where he is inspired by the natural settings and flower power of both.

Pneuma, 2024
30 x 20
Edition of 30
Screen print on oak panel
Signed and numbered

Filed Under: Art Prints Tagged With: Arts Spectacles Paris, Future In The Balance, l'Oeil Ouvert, Muses, Paris, Sortir a Paris

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Latest News

  • Sperry Solo “Universal” Coming to Paris
  • Sperry in Popland 2025 at KochxBos Gallery, Amsterdam
  • Chuck Sperry’s Alice Donut Poster
  • Chuck Sperry’s “The Mystic” & “Iphigenia” Blotters • 
Online Release with EQL
  • Available Now: Chuck Sperry’s Newest Protest Art Poster

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About Chuck Sperry

Chuck Sperry lives in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where he’s made his particular style of rock poster designs for over 20 years. He operates Hangar 18, a silkscreen print studio, located in Oakland. Learn More…

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Sperry Books: “Color x Color” • “Helikon” • “Chthoneon” • “Idyllion”

Latest Blog Posts

  • Sperry Solo “Universal” Coming to Paris
  • Sperry in Popland 2025 at KochxBos Gallery, Amsterdam
  • Chuck Sperry’s Alice Donut Poster
  • Chuck Sperry’s “The Mystic” & “Iphigenia” Blotters • 
Online Release with EQL
  • Available Now: Chuck Sperry’s Newest Protest Art Poster

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