48 Hills • November 1, 2023 • by Mary Corbin
Edwardian Ball 2024 Poster
Edwardian Ball 2024
14.5 x 35
Edition of 250
3 colors on cream paper
Signed and Numbered
I will make a limited online launch of my Edwardian Ball 2024 poster through EQL opening on Sunday, January 28, 2024 at 9 am PST. The launch closes (same day) on Sunday, January 28, 2024 at 9 pm PST.
Visit the launch page for the release (countdown and launch):
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.”
My 2024 poster for the Edwardian Ball is a portrait of architect Stanford White with art model turned superstar of stage and silent screen Evelyn Nesbit.
Stanford White was famous as one of the foremost architects of the Beaux-Arts style, his prolific architectural designs became known as “American Renaissance”. Simply put he created lavish Guilded Age mansions for the masters of the known universe, the Astors and the Vanderbilts among the pantheon.
White was one of a group of wealthy debauchées, all members of the Union Club, who organized frequent orgies in secret locations scattered about Manhattan. Mark Twain summed up Stanford White thus: “eagerly and diligently and ravenously and remorselessly hunting young girls to their destruction. These facts have been well known in New York for many years.”
Evelyn Nesbit was well-known too as New York model and chorus girl. She was frequently photographed for mass circulation newspapers, magazine advertisements, souvenir items and calendars (all media new to the Century). She started as an artist’s model in Philadelphia. Nesbit continued modeling after her family moved to New York, posing for artists including most notably Charles Dana Gibson who idealized her as a “Gibson Girl”, his extremely popular pin-ups of the era.
White set his sites on Nesbit. The affair showed his predatory modus operandi some details include: extremely uneven power relationship, luxurious settings, promises of wealth, fame, a red velvet swing suspended from the ceiling, surreptitious doses of morphine, and rape of the 16 year old ingenue.
Soon after her days with White ended, Nesbit became involved with the reckless, self-indulgent Harry Kendall Thaw, heir to a titanic Pittsburgh railroad empire. Thaw was rather unhinged, addicted to morphine, violent, sadistic, and fabulously wealthy. By way of courting Evelyn, Thaw took her on a sojourn in Europe, and begged her to marry him.
Knowing of his insistance on the principle of chastity, Evelyn divulged the White affair and the loss of her virginity, and gave Thaw the details in a series of abusive interrogations across the Continent.
The interrogations were punctuated by an obsessive itinerary of grim, gothic sites focusing on the cult of virgin martyrdom insisted upon by Thaw — his mad courtship — and finally, worn-down, Nesbit relented. They married and Evelyn became the “Mistress of Millions” according to the papers.
Thereafter, Thaw was obsessed with avenging Evelyn’s honor. In June 1906, the couple visited New York City to board a luxury steamliner for a second tour of Europe. Thaw brought Evelyn to the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden to attend the premier of Mam’zelle Champagne, a rave choral revue. There, in front of New York Society Thaw confronted White, and shot him dead during the finale “I Could Love A Million Girls”.
“In New York City the papers were full of the shooting of the famous architect Stanford White by Harry K. Thaw, eccentric scion of a coke and railroad fortune. Harry K. Thaw was the husband of Evelyn Nesbit, the celebrated beauty who had once been Stanford White’s mistress. The shooting took place in the roof garden of the Madison Square Garden on 26th Street, a spectacular block-long building of yellow brick and terra cotta that White himself had designed in the Sevillian style. It was the opening night of a revue entitled Mamzelle Champagne, and as the chorus sang and danced the eccentric scion wearing on this summer night a straw boater and heavy black coat pulled out a pistol and shot the famous architect three times in the head. On the roof. There were screams. Evelyn fainted. She had been a well-known artist’s model at the age of fifteen. Her underclothes were white. Her husband habitually whipped her. She happened once to meet Emma Goldman, the revolutionary. Goldman lashed her with her tongue … And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.”
— E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (1975)
In Thaw family lore according to Evelyn’s grandson: After Harry Thaw’s murder trial, Evelyn received a final $25,000 settlement from the Thaw family. To spite the wealthy capitalist Thaw clan, Evelyn donated the whole sum to anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman. Goldman in turn gave the money to writer, activist, and socialist John Reed, author of “Ten Days That Shook The World” — his first-person account of the Russian Revolution that toppled the Russian Imperial Family and set the Communist Revolution in motion.
Sperry Solo Show in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury with Psychedelic SF Gallery
Psychedelic SF Gallery is pleased to present Chuck Sperry in “My Mind’s Eye” — a solo art exposition by the world famous printmaking master. For his upcoming solo in San Francisco, Chuck will be showing new and archive blotter art, archive panels, a selection of editions on paper, rare test prints and surprises.
American artist Chuck Sperry is renown for his ethereal, psychedelically saturated screen prints that draw crowds of dedicated fans around the world. Iconic in both the concert music and art worlds — Sperry draws inspiration from the raw energy of live performances his art enhances — and stylistically from graffiti, pop art, and Art Nouveau. He currently imagines a verdant garden of new work tended by his signature shimmering muses, calling this work a “utopian provocation.”
On view: February 3, 2024 – April 2024.
Opening: Saturday, February 3, 4 pm to 8 pm.
Psychedelic SF Gallery Presents:
“My Mind’s Eye” a Chuck Sperry solo exhibition
1399 Haight Street • San Francisco
In my minds eye
Things are clearer than before
Showing me the way
Asking me to stay
I’ll never close the door
To all these things and more
— Steve Marriott, Ronnie Lane (Small Faces)
The Young Gods, Fribourg Poster, Chuck Sperry
The Young Gods, Fribourg 2023
21 x 37.5
(53 x 95 cm)
Edition of 100
5 colors on Fedrigoni paper
Signed and numbered
When The Young Gods requested a poster from me for their upcoming show in Fribourg, Switzerland (their home town), I was immediately very excited and greatly honoured to accept the commission. This show is sure to be legendary.
I sent the band a message to accept, but also warned that I may have to reinvent the wheel to make the poster happen. This is the first concert poster entirely designed in my new art studio in Grasse, France.
I do not have a printing studio here in Grasse at present, so I had to think fast, to find a way to produce an edition of these posters.
Luckily I have friends in Torino, Italy (just four hours away) with an excellent print studio, Sericraft. Giampo Copperoni made me an introduction to Sericraft some years ago, and again I asked him to reach out to Sericraft during the busiest month of the year, to request their top-notch printing expertise. The team at Sericraft was excited by the idea, accepted to print for me, and I am thankful, they have produced an amazing edition!
The Young Gods poster will be available through The Young Gods at the concert on Friday, December 22, 2023 at Fri-Son, Fribourg.
I will make a very limited online launch through EQL starting on Saturday, January 20, 2024 at 12 noon PST. The launch closes on Sunday, January 21, 2024 at 12 noon PST.
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 the release:
———
Show announcement from the Fri-Son Auditorium in Fribourg:
The Young Gods are back home!
There are infinite superlatives to refer to the legendary Friborg group The Young Gods. The trio — which has played countless times on our big stage and each time to a full house — is back on December 22, 2023 for a concert as part of our 40th anniversary year.
Pioneering wizards of sound, The Young Gods have been pushing the horizon of possibilities for almost 40 years now. From the industrial punk of their beginnings through the techno-shamanic intoxications of the last decades, The Young Gods have forged a unique sound, acquiring the status of legends of the European scene.
Hailed by the British press since 1987, praised by David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails, The Young Gods have released more than 10 albums, once reinterpreting the legendary Woodstock concert live alongside Richie Havens at Fri-Son in 2009, and also collaborating with the hip-hop group Dälek, and with Mike Patton (Faith No More, Fantomâs).
This traditional end-of-year event is also the last show in our “40 years” concert series: on this occasion The Young Gods will play their classics, from 1985 to today, and maybe even a few new ones. An evening which takes on a very special dimension for the group which cut its teeth here, and of which Franz Treichler is one of the founding members.
Adding to the splendor of this evening which promises to be grandiose, we are delighted to welcome the Lucerne group of Schnellertollermeier as the opening act.
Fri-Son x The Young Gods: Both Loud & Proud since 1983-1985.
Chuck Sperry’s 50th Anniversary “Fantastic Planet” Poster
La Planète Sauvage, 2023
20 x 30
Edition of 200
6 colors on cream paper
Signed and numbered
I am proud to unveil my very special 50th anniversary poster for Fantastic Planet! I created this to celebrate the 35mm film screening at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and is limited to only 200 copies.
Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence.
Online sales begin next week through Spoke Art Gallery. Please make sure you’re on the Spoke Art Gallery email list to receive the latest news: https://spoke-art.com/pages/mailing-list
More info: https://spoke-art.com/…/chuck-sperry-x-fantastic-planet
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