I'm barreling my way through the muggy heat and cacophony of the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago when I reach a seemingly serene group of tents in a corner of the park. On closer examination, brightly colored missiles, fluorescent lollipops, staggering zombies, and dangling tentacles greet my eye courtesy of the silk-screened posters created by the many artists that have gathered here to sell their work as part of the 13th Flatstock Poster Convention. A collaboration between the American Poster Institute (API), Gigposters.com and the Pitchfork Music Festival, Flatstock began in 2002 as a way to promote the work of silk-screen artists from across the world and takes place in several different cities (Austin, Seattle, Chicago and Berlin) throughout the year.  

"You're bringing together all these different people from all over the country and all over the world who may be in their little podunk town doing silk-screening," said Geoff Peveto, President of API, commenting on the wide spectrum of artists on display.  Stemming from the website Gigposters.com, a forum launched in 2001 where silk-screen artists could share posters and tips, Flatstock (a play on 'Woodstock' and the two dimensional quality of the posters) grew into an international festival. "Any time you get a big group of nerds together, you start having conventions," joked Jay Ryan, organizer of the Chicago Flatstock and owner of silk-screen design studio The Bird Machine. "Clayton Hayes started Gigposters and suddenly all these little communities found each other over a very short period of time."

Silk-screening, the stenciling process developed to paint designs and logos on t-shirts and advertisements, has seen a resurgence since the heyday of the 1960's, when screened rock posters touting the Grateful Dead and Santana at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco were part of the pop culture landscape.  Close to 6,500 artists now list their silk-screened work on Gigposters.com with more adding their work each day.  "It just kind of blew up," said Peveto. "There are poster artists from Israel posting stuff on Gigposters...  Through this website we've all started networking."

John Solimine, owner of Spike Press, commented on finally meeting some of the Gigposters artists he communicated with online.  "You get to know people's visual style very quickly, but you have no idea what they look like, so you get here and you're like, 'Oh! I know that guy!' and get to meet the person behind the art."  Diana Sudyka, a co-collaborator of The Bird Machine offered this explanation of screenprinting’s social roots, "Print-making takes a lot of work.  It's very physical and you're often working with other people, so it's collaborative.  I think that spirit transfers itself to the community and the sort of support we have for one another." Billy Baumann of the Delicious Design League added, "There's a lot of little tips and tricks and stuff that you just absorb from talking to everybody in this community which is invaluable."

Posters advertising gigs for indie acts like the Decemberists and Animal Collective to rappers like Snoop and Rakim adorn the rows of tents lined with eager festival-goers.  Ryan mused on the attention the convention was receiving, "It's an interesting time to be doing [silk-screening] because people are becoming much more aware of it. We've managed to build an audience. The people who come to this thing, for the most part, are an educated audience who understands that these are prints that are handmade in limited runs and that they're different from the Brittany Spears offset poster that you're gonna find at the mall."

The do-it-yourself approach includes not just the art, but also the process. When Mark Brickey of Hero Design Studio in Buffalo, NY bought a silk-screening press for his company, "None of us knew how to screen, so we taught ourselves, figured it out, started doing posters and it's been like, the best thing we ever did. We started really focusing on doing things for ourselves the way we wanted to do them and finding ourselves as artists along the way." Solimine had similar feelings. "I got into web design and that quickly got really sterile and antiseptic, just sitting in front of a computer all day... Doing this was great because you get your hands dirty and you're sweating and it's very visceral and tangible."

For most artists at Flatstock, the worlds of music and art often intersect. Many of the silk-screeners had been in a band or were currently in a band. "Someone says, 'Well the drummer can draw, he can make a poster.' And then the band breaks up but the drummer keeps making posters," said Ryan said over the roar of concert-goers in the distance. Dan Macadam, owner of Crosshair Studios and member of the band Arriver, chimed in with his own experience, "A lot of the people we've done posters for over the years are people who started out as being our friends and now some of them are in known bands."

Speaking with Ryan about the popularity of the posters he said, "You have to understand that some of these posters, to some degree, are sort of special as an object, as advertising ... for bands that are not on the cover of Rolling Stone all the time."  For many of the artists, the the lines of accessible pop art and more expensive fine art continue to blur.  Jeral Tidwell of Crackhead Press commented, "Just in my short career as a poster artist, posters that were on poles are now on eBay for like 100 bucks. It’s just insane how it works out."

Looking around at the hundreds of different styles and ideas layered on each poster, I wondered where inspiration struck for many of the artists.  For Brickey, "The thing I was amazed at in this industry is that so many people who are designers are really, really creative ... and have a great vision for things. On my hunch, 90% of everything you see back here was not art directed. Almost all of it is the designers vision.” Brickey paused and then continued, “I think it's kind of funny that this is what happens when you let talented people do their own thing and don't try to micromanage them."

As dusk began to fall and the music came to a crescendo in the distance, Ryan remarked, "It's been a great thing to be involved in ... I was really lucky to get into this when I did."

FURTHER RESOURCES:
American Poster Institute:   www.americanposterinstitute.com
Pitchfork Music Festival: www.pitchforkmusicfestival.com
Geoff Peveto:  www.thedecoderring.com
Gigposters.com:  www.gigposters.com
Flatstock:  http://www.flatstock.com/
The Bird Machine:  http://thebirdmachine.com/
Spike Press:  http://www.spikepress.com/
Diana Sudyka: http://dianasudyka.com/
Delicious Design League:  http://www.deliciousdesignleague.com/
Hero Design Studio:  http://www.heroandsound.com/
Crosshair Studios:  http://www.crosshairchicago.com/
Jeral Tidwell:  http://humantree.com/

Storque Flickr set:  http://flickr.com/photos/etsystorque/sets/7215760