ArtStart Gallery Exhibitions

Inside Artstart
Friday and Saturday 11am-4pm

Stevens Street Gallery Exhibition: Hatch Print Posters

Hatch Show Print is one of the oldest letterpress print shops in the country and a Nashville landmark. Since its start 144 years ago, Hatch Show Print has been in continuous operation, producing vibrant advertisements and posters using the same approach to letterpress printing through the decades, leveraging the shop’s wood and metal type alongside hand-carved printing blocks for imagery and graphic elements, to create eye-catching work. As advertisements, the posters and ads were meant to tell you or sell you something, from where to fill up your car’s fuel tank to when the next tent show or live entertainment act was traveling through town, from traveling carnivals to concerts by Grand Ole Opry stars such as Bill Monroe and Minnie Pearl, or other entertainers ranging from Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash to Elvis Presley and Led Zeppelin as well as the great African-American jazz and blues entertainers of the day, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith.

Today, the staff of eight designer-printers continue to work with handset wood and metal type, hand-carve imagery into printing blocks and combine these traditional methods with twenty-first century design sensibilities to produce posters that are sold at the shows as merchandise for live concerts, or commemorate milestone events such as presidential political debates, museum exhibitions, and more. At Hatch Show Print, the printer is the designer, and the designer is the printer. The work the shop turns out is, indeed, a tonic for the digital age.

 

Glass Gallery Exhibition Title: Jim Sherraden's New Works

This exhibit features Jim Sherraden’s colorful new work, his woodcuts, paper quilts as well as a new collaborative effort creating ceramic tiles.

Jim is influenced by the rich tradition of pattern and decoration found in artwork ranging from Mediterranean tiles to Southwestern American textiles, from Oriental rugs to his Aunt Vera’s quilts. “I readily cut up my own artwork, printed from the blocks I have carved since the early 80s.” "Paper which 'falls to the floor' is used to create the paper quilts. This has expanded to include compositions both balanced and asymmetrical, and rich in color and contrast."

Since 1984 Jim’s name has been synonymous with Hatch Show Print, the iconic letterpress poster and design shop in Nashville, Tennessee. For his work at Hatch, Sherraden was a recipient of the 2013 Distinguished Artist Award for the state of Tennessee. His art has toured with the Smithsonian and has been shown at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as multiple venues both in the United States and abroad.