It was a sincere pleasure to work with Chris Shaw on this poster designed for Public Enemy at The Regency – and hella fun to go and see the show together – WORD! Here’s Chris:
“I was thrilled when Chuck Sperry asked me if I wanted to do a Public Enemy poster for his Goldenvoice series, I’m a huge Public Enemy fan from way back when. Doing a poster for a band you love isn’t always as great as it sounds, sometimes you can get hung up on trying to get a perfect image and idea and overwork the art. Trying not to over-think things, I decided to go with an old-school political poster, the kind of thing I was making in the 80’s when I listened to P.E. constantly. I’ve made a ton of art over the years listening to that band, and felt like going back to my roots.
Somehow I think I’ve wanted to make this poster for a long time. The last time I made a Public Enemy poster it was for the Fillmore, I don’t think a riot cop with a bloody baton would have passed pre-screening over there. In particular, I decided to make this poster a BART cop. BART is a Bay Area transit agency who’s police force has been involved in some very questionable shootings, have been handling themselves pretty badly, they’ve been in the news a lot. Knowing the band, the image seemed fitting, and timely.
The image is a collage of pieces from different riot cop photos, put together to make an especially sinister figure. I altered a lot of the small details along the way then separated the art into 3 colors, standard “politics” black & red, plus a bright silver… the silver gives it that rock poster feel. For the variants, we printed a pure cyan instead of the black plate, and used some different stock. A big thanks Chuck for being the master of his press, this was an especially clean run of posters.”
Chris will have these posters and variant editions dropping at a random time on his website this Friday, August 26, 2011. Full poster details, loads of photos and documentation, at chrisshawstudio.com
You must be logged in to post a comment.