Category: Broadsides

August 14, 2009

End of the Line

For nearly a year now, the Dead Feminists series has given us an outlet for both our aspirations and frustrations. For every social and political victory, there follows a reminder of how divided we are as a culture. We were so proud to see Victory Garden become a part of a nation-wide movement toward sustainability—but a movement and a majority are not the same thing. We are delighted whenever a customer tells us that Prop Cake is meant for a wedding gift—but are heartbroken by the reminder that for many people, the gesture can only be symbolic. Yet through it all we remain optimistic that art can make a difference—that a bright future is out there, somewhere, and that we can help find the way to it.

Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.
— Harriet Tubman

This is why we chose Harriet Tubman for our latest piece. There are so many pressing issues vying for our attention—war, the economy, healthcare, the environment, transit, equality, etc.—that we couldn’t choose just one. So we decided to focus on the journey itself. For all the ground we’ve gained in our country’s short history, we have a long, long way to go—and the only way we’ll get there is together. Harriet Tubman knew that when she fought for freedom and civil rights, and she devoted her entire life to the idea.

So here, submitted for your approval, is End of the Line. As always, everything—from the illustrated lettering to the letterpress printing—is done completely by hand. This time, though, we’re asking you to flex your reading muscles a bit: to symbolize the difficult journey faced by anyone with a great task, we made it somewhat of a challenge to read.

Don’t worry, though—Harriet is there to guide you. Just follow her lantern, and you’ll find the right path. If you lose your way, just look for the Drinkin’ Gourd.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

End of the Line: No. 5 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 146
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press and hand-colored with watercolor. Each piece is printed on archival, 100% rag, recycled paper, and signed by both artists.

Colophon:
Harriet Tubman (1820 – 1913) was born Araminta Ross as a slave in Maryland. In 1849 she escaped north traveling via the Underground Railway to Philadelphia. Once free, “Moses” made 19 more round trips—guiding nearly 300 slaves to freedom—and she “never lost a passenger.” During the Civil War, Tubman recruited slaves to fight for the Union Army and led the Combahee River expedition to free more than 750 people. After the war she continued to work tirelessly for the rights of women and African Americans.

Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, who believe that cooperation and hope give us the momentum to reach the end of the line—without losing any passengers.

UPDATE: poster is sold out. Reproduction postcards available in the shop!

May 12, 2009

Tugboat Thea

Well, here she be. (Or should I say, Thar she blows?)

At long last, Thea is here, barnacles and all. Jessica and I unveiled her at our Pressing Matters talk at the Tacoma Art Museum this morning. I have to say, I was nervous that with the weekday morning time slot, we’d be hoist on our own petard for the big debut. Since 10:30 on a Tuesday isn’t exactly an hour available to everybody, we were afraid we’d be lecturing a bunch of empty chairs. Boy were we wrong. Many thanks to all of you who skipped out on work, took a long (and very early) lunch, or otherwise carved out an hour of your day to spend with us—we raise our pirate flags to you. And to Allison Baer, TAM’s very own renaissance woman who made it all happen, you get the biggest Jolly Roger of them all. Thank you.

This week I’m going to post some of the things we talked about today at TAM, about the making of Tugboat Thea and our series. But for now, let’s just get down to brass tacks about the broadside. Here’s the quote that started it all:

There are so many things left to do. — Thea Foss

In honor of enterprising women everywhere, the print features business pioneer and entrepreneur Thea Foss, who founded the Foss Tugboat company in Tacoma, WA—at a time in history when it was not only courageous, but nearly unheard of for a woman to do so. Here Thea is portrayed as the figurehead of her own tugboat, surrounded by crashing waves and sea life native to her home waters of Puget Sound.

Tugboat Thea: No. 4 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 89
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Norwegian immigrant Thea Christiansen Foss (1857 – 1927) arrived by train to Tacoma in 1889 as Washington achieved statehood. While her husband Andrew was at work she spent five dollars on a rowboat, launching a marine transport business that would grow into Foss Maritime, operating the west coast’s largest fleet of tugboats. Thea inspired the character “Tugboat Annie” featured in a Saturday Evening Post series, motion pictures and a television show. Tacoma’s Thea Foss Waterway is an inlet connected to Puget Sound named in her honor.

UPDATE: poster is sold out. Reproduction postcards available in the shop!

February 9, 2009

Prop Cake

Jessica Spring and I have been having a high ol’ time with our series thus far, celebrating positive changes happening around the country with the first two prints we created. At the same time, we were shocked and dismayed to learn that in the recent election, Proposition 8 had passed in California. We wanted to express our thoughts on the matter, so Prop Cake was born. The quote we chose made the issue seem like…well, a piece of cake:

There is nothing complicated about ordinary equality. —Alice Paul

The initial idea for this piece came almost immediately; Jessica looked over at me on a drive home from Seattle one day and said, “How about a big, pink wedding cake?” I grinned from ear to ear, and started sketching as soon as I got home. The design didn’t come together so easily, however. Everything I came up with looked more like an ad for Modern Bride than a political poster. Frustrated, I pushed my sketches aside and took a few days off to think.

And then I went to San Francisco.

It was my first trip there, and my first thought as I passed through the residential neighborhoods, with rows and rows of candy-colored stucco houses, was “Wow, these things look like big frosted cakes!” And the lightbulb turned on, at last. I spent three days walking, driving, and riding around the neighborhoods, camera and sketchbook in hand. I made pages and pages of notes on architectural detailing.

When I arrived home, I got right to work. This time, finally, it all came together.

Alice was right—it really was a piece of cake.

Prop Cake: No. 3 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 108
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Alice Stokes Paul (1885 – 1977) continued the work of the suffragists, and helped form the National Woman’s Party to demand equal rights. The NWP engaged in militant demonstrations and the first picketing of the White House; these “Silent Sentinels” were mobbed and imprisoned, then force-fed while attempting a hunger strike. Public and media support for their cause grew and by 1920, women secured the vote. Alice Paul continued to work on their behalf, writing the original Equal Rights Amendment in 1923.

UPDATE: poster is sold out. Reproduction postcards available in the shop!

December 5, 2008

Victory Garden

With the success of our first piece, Jessica and I wanted to continue our series with something that upped the ante a bit. And to our complete shock, we were rewarded by our second broadside selling out in just 48 hours (thanks to the magic of the internets!). Our next subject is one that we both have been thinking about for some time: personal sustainability. As my husband and I are both hard-core seasonal foodies, and as Jessica is a member of a local crop share, we’d like to see a change in the American food system. So we turned to one of our favorite feminists: Eleanor Roosevelt.

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

While serving as First Lady, Roosevelt planted a White House victory garden during World War II; thanks to her inspiration and example, during the War home gardens accounted for 40% of the U.S. supply of vegetable produce. We thought, hey, if it could be done once, why not again? So the colophon at the bottom included a plea for the new First Lady, Michelle Obama, to carry on in Roosevelt’s footsteps.

The inspiration for Victory Garden came from a variety of sources. For one thing, the typography is inspired by the Art Deco designs of Roosevelt’s era. For another, I thought back to my honeymoon in France last year.

I spent a day at Versailles on that trip, and at the time was struck by the meticulous aesthetic that unified every element of the place. Everything from the wallpaper to the upholstery to the grounds themselves worked together to form a cohesive overall design. An overly ornate and despicably ostentatious design, sure (and a bit ironic, considering Marie Antoinette’s consequences for going overboard with luxury in the face of a starving populace), but it was beautiful in its own right. I especially loved the sculpted hedges and lawns of the Versailles gardens; the patterns form a stunning, living brocade at one’s feet. And I wanted to turn that design sense into something that represented the greater good, rather than the wealth of the few. So I abstracted that idea into a two-dimensional White House lawn, made up with an original brocade pattern of spiraling leaves.

When we finally arrived at the finished product, we were happily surprised to learn that many others had had similar thoughts. We discovered Michael Pollan’s editorials; learned about the “Eat the View” movement; and found many other like-minded folk along the way—including one who purchased a copy of Victory Garden for her friend, a direct descendant of Eleanor Roosevelt herself. As the icing on the cake, one of our Chicago customers has a personal connection to the Obamas, and promised to deliver a copy of the broadside to the First Lady, with our compliments. We have no idea if it actually reached her in the end, but there’s always hope. And besides, we’re taking a bit of personal pride in being part of a larger movement, as well as the fact that the new White House garden is already happening.

Victory garden, indeed.

Victory Garden: No. 2 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 76
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) transformed the role of first lady in the White House, where she served from 1933-1945. In an effort to cultivate self-sufficiency and patriotism, she planted a Victory Garden on the White House lawn. Spurred in part by the first lady’s example, more than 20 million Americans had home gardens and grew 40% of the country’s produce during World War II. Today, amid rising food prices, climate change, and the finite supply of fossil fuels, we encourage the next first lady, Michelle Obama, to follow in Eleanor Roosevelt’s footsteps and set an example for sustainability and hope once more—beginning on the White House lawn.

Poster is sold out. Reproduction postcards available in the shop!

October 15, 2008

Come, Come

We should probably start this blog with where this whole thing began. You see, we never meant the Dead Feminists to be a series at all. Just as the 2008 Presidential election was heating up, Jessica asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a political broadside together. We both felt like it was an important moment in history, and we wanted to make some sort of contribution to the artistic record. Jessica said she had a historical quote that would be fun to typeset, and asked if I could do a quick illustration of a pair of spectacles to go with it. She thought it’d be fun to make the glasses look like the famous eyewear of a certain Alaskan VP candidate (who can see Russia from her house!)—her plan was to use her impressive collection of wood and metal type to hand-set the quote into the design.

Well, she probably shouldn’t have left me alone with my pencils, because I got a little carried away, and drew not just the glasses, but the whole quote around them, too:

Come, come my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles and see the world is moving. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

I did this because I wanted the piece to be something more than simply a jab at a political personality. I wanted it to be beautiful in its own right, something that might do justice to Stanton’s words, and that would be longer-lasting than a momentary visual pun. Besides, Stanton put up one of the most important fights in American history: women’s suffrage. In this country with with a voter turnout rate of less than two-thirds, I wanted to do my small part to get women everywhere, regardless of political stripe, to the polls. And then, as it always does, my fingers started itching to draw my own letterforms. After all, for as much as I love hand-setting type, one of the reasons I’m a letterer is because I’m continually frustrated by the finite number of typefaces available in wood and metal. Not that I’m happy with choosing among the thousands and thousands of digital font families out there, either. Let’s just say I’m picky. So I made up my mind to letter the whole thing by hand, and not to tell Jessica until the sketch was done.

Bless her heart, she went along with the idea. We scrapped the idea of setting vintage type and printed the image using a modern material called photopolymer plates (more on that on our process page). And then we put the broadside into our online shop, and sent out an email to our little mailing list to let them know we’d made something new.

Three days later, the entire edition of prints was sold out. We were floored! Neither of us had ever experienced this kind of clamoring for our work before—we’d both sold out editions before, but not this quickly. People started emailing us and asking if we were going to do more posters. After reading that, we kind of looked at each other and said, “Why not?”

And all of a sudden, we had ourselves a series.

Come, Come: No. 1 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 44 prints
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches

Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag (cotton) paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.

Colophon reads:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 – 1902) spent her life in pursuit of women’s rights. She wrote many speeches delivered by Susan B. Anthony, who said Stanton “forged the thunderbolts” that she delivered as they worked together for women’s suffrage. Stanton raised seven children and organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848 but died without ever casting her vote before the 19th Amendment passed in 1920.

Poster is sold out. Reproduction postcards available in the shop!