Austin ChronicleAustin ChroniclePublished on 3/18/2006
Girls Can Tell by Melanie Haupt. Article on female poster artists at Flatstock 8 at SXSW.
We kicked off the day with a visit to Flatstock 8, the rock-poster show that gathers more credit every year and continues today at the Convention Center, free, 11am-6pm. I wanted to check in with a few of the female artists on hand, simply because there are so few of them.
- Strawberryluna does three-color screenprinting two days a week in a co-op in Pittsburgh, working in a soft palette of colors that has striking emotional resonance. A poster for a Sufjan Stevens show features dragonflies dancing in the moonlight, an image she conjured when thinking about the show's late-summer date.
- Eleanor Grosch of Push Me Pull You Design, out of Philadelphia, specializes in quirky animal prints, such as a yarn llama that has come unraveled on her Be Your Own Pet concert poster. Check out the display of Keds at her booth; a limited edition run of shoes featuring three of Grosch's designs hits stores in May; she was "discovered" at a previous Flatstock.
- Perhaps the best-known and most successful (to date) of the women artists at Flatstock is Tara McPherson of New York City. McPherson is a veritable monster of merchandise. In addition to her concert posters, including a very striking one for Depeche Mode, McPherson has buttons, stationery, stickers and toys for sale, and will soon launch a line of toys featuring her Orion character. If that's not enough, she's currently painting a comic for DC Comics.