A Post On Posters

I have always been someone who has to be collecting something.

When I was a kid it was Legos, Beanie Babies and Micro Machines. I had almost all the major Lego Star Wars sets - including this one, I had over a hundred Beanie Babies - including quite a few rare ones - and I had more Micro Machines than could choke a preschool.

When I grew up, the obsession became baseball hats, of which I still have two plastic containers of old ones I don't wear anymore.

Then I moved on to instruments. I have a trumpet, a keyboard, a drum set, a mandolin, a bodhran (Irish drum) and a bell set. I can play these ranging from very well to barely at all.

Early in college, some of these collectibles weren't even tangible. I used to listen to two hour-long radio shows a week whether or not the content interested me. While hanging my clothes after doing three weeks worth of laundry, I would plug in my headphones and listen to the sonorous voices of Ira Glass and friends until the show was over.

Now, I still love those shows but find myself listening to them on anything but a regular basis.

As of the past few years, I've moved on to new habits, new collections - my favorite being art posters.

The picture top right is exactly why I love art posters - especially concert posters. That poster might be the perfect summation of the band Of Montreal. If you know that band - what their sound is, how they act, what their songs are like - you can then understand the artist's rendering. And only 74 people beside me will be able to own this image.

Most of my posters are like this. Many of them are painstakingly screen printed, rare, numbered works but all of them have some sort of story or background, like this Of Montreal poster that I searched to find for close to three years, that make them uniquely personal.

This poster was commissioned for a show which was the first time I had ever seen Of Montreal perform live - they are one of my favorite bands and one of the best live shows around. It was the first time I had ever been inside the Metro in Chicago, now one of my favorite venues because of the great memories I have there. It was also the first time I had heard of MGMT, an opening act that night and prior to their first album release.

After the show, the poster was sold out so I bought a concert T-shirt (which, incidentally, is another thing I seem to collect) but I kept looking. In fact, I bought the poster at the top right six months or more after this concert because I had resigned myself to the fact that this poster was gone. It was going to have to serve as a surrogate.

However, after looking around the web a few years later, I found out who had made the poster for that night and contacted them directly. They quickly responded and offered me the option to purchase one of their last two copies (they only printed 50) that they had in their private collection for a price they let me name. Finding the poster was completely worth the three year wait just to find out how cool the people were who made it.

Upon receiving the poster in the mail, a nice little handwritten note on the printout PayPal receipt slipped out from the cardboard packing tube. It was from the employee I dealt with throughout this process - he thanked me for my support and had also sent me a non-commissioned piece they had done for free.

Both posters hang on my wall in prominent positions and the note on the receipt is attached to the back of one of them. Whenever I look at them, they remind me of a singular moment when I realized how generous and wonderful people can be and how easy it is to do so.

This act has kept me a close follower of this company. I have bought other art from them, other posters of bands I like and even of bands and events I do not know much or anything about (some of those were packaged in a sale where you got 5 posters at random for the price of one and a half - pretty cool stuff). Yet, they are all really striking and beautiful art.

I have other concert posters that are unique. I once went to a sold out show for the Black Keys at the Metro and was able to get this poster on the artist's website a few days later (once again I waited too long at the show). In this case, I'm not quite sure the Akron, OH rock duo quite jibe with a part wood rooster but the artist, Dan Grzeca (jet-sah), is amazing.

The last concert poster I got in person was for a Dead Weather concert at the Vic in Chicago. Jack White's heavy rock band didn't disappoint and neither did the poster that is made entirely of old guns except for the piercing yellow eyes which glow in the dark. Needless to say, this poster kicks ass and once again it sums up the sound, image and message of the band it was created for.

This Wilco poster, while not as rare as those mentioned above (it is a poster for about 10 concerts listed at the bottom), it reminds me of one of the best weekends of my college career. While this tour poster for Nickel Creek is a token from the last time I saw them before they split up (that poster is a bit girlie but so are some of their songs, which I unabashedly love, so I guess I have to respect the accuracy of the image. Plus it glows in the dark which is totally boss).

This poster isn't a concert or tour poster, it is a promotional poster for LCD Soundsystem's album Sound of Silver. I cannot find this poster anywhere else on the web as of recent so I have no idea how rare this actually is.

Now, not all of my posters are so unique and personal. While some of my collection I would consider art, some of it is more like mass produced pop art. My Lollapalooza posters fit this mold.

My friend Mike Marshall and I have been to every three day incarnation of the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago (that is to say 2006-2010, so far). For Chicago natives and music lovers like us, it is a perfect fit. It also helps us make sure we see each other at least once during the summers since we have both had school, travels and jobs since we left high school.

The posters they have at Lolla are mass produced and aren't always silk screen printed but rather are digitally printed - but that does not make them any less special or interesting to me - which is why I make sure to get the official poster each year.

For instance, you may recognize this image. You most certainly recognize this one. And those were both created by the same artist who did the 2006 Lollapalooza poster (which is pre-HOPEama).

2007's poster is one of the funniest images I have ever seen and I get to look at it every day.

And while 2008, 2009 and 2010 all remind me of the weekend of fun I had in Grant Park that year, the creative imagery is what keeps me buying the poster rather than a T-shirt or something else.

And I think that's what gets me to buy any of my posters. To me they are modern - and by that I mean current - art.

My most recent addition to my art collection is something I think is even more lasting than any of the other images I have hanging in my room. This poster, a replica of an advertisement from the 1920s, is indicative of a few of my loves; the city of Chicago, Modernism and Art Deco. Together, along with the beautiful script and composition, the poster symbolizes more than what it says.

And that's why I love all of my posters: Because I have defined them in terms of what defines me.