I was walking around campus and its Charles Village environs early one morning a few weeks ago, armed with a stapler, a roll of packing tape and a trash bag full of posters for HampdenFest, tacking them on any free wall space I could find. I had to weed out week old flyers for used Ikea furniture, research test subject wanted ads and lectures long since delivered in order to make room for my own oversized notices. They were hard to miss.
Not only were they full-sized posters, but the pastel pinks, yellows and mint greens of the various campus clubs' photocopied flyers paled in comparison to their blaring flourescent pink and green lettering. Then, as I hung yet another poster, I saw a tiny detail I hadn't noticed before. There, hidden in the bottom right hand corner was the artist's name which read,in tiny print, "Mr. Sugiuchi."
The mystery man, as it turns out, is Scott Sugiuchi, one of several local artists featured in an upcoming show of poster art at Baltimore Theatre Project's John Fonda Gallery from Oct. 29 through Nov. 24.
Sugiuchi belongs to a select group of artists who focus their talents on designing posters. A medium often pooh-poohed by fine artists but considered the gold standard amongst designers, posters straddle the line between art and advertising, the thriftstore junk rack and the antique shop's vintage finds. And from Henri Toulouse Lautrec's posters for the Moulin Rouge, to the modern day rock concert poster, posters have also enjoyed a long tradition in the entertainment world.
In the tradition of poster art legends,Wes Wilson, the artist who made the Grateful Dead synonymous with skeletons, and Art Chantry, a Seattle based artist who has designed posters and album covers for groups like the Flaming Lips, Sugiuchi's posters dwell largely in the world of subculture music.
As he describes it, the archetypal poster artist is a smart-assed, tattooed combination of rebel artist and pseudo-rock star. But this pseudo-lifestyle was his reality for awhile.
For eight years, Sugiuchi enjoyed a stint as a rock star, playing bass for a band called The Hate Bombs, recording a few albums and criss-crossing the country on tour. "Meeting other bands on the road is how I got a lot of design gigs," he says.
And not just any design gigs. Sugiuchi has designed posters for such bands as Yo La Tengo, Southern Culture on the Skids, The Melvins, Fugazi, Marilyn Manson, The Smashing Pumpkins and Green Day when they were still fledgling underground groups.
I got a chance to sit down with Sugiuchi, a board member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), on a recent sunny morning in the offices of Eisner Communications, a downtown advertising agency housed in an interestingly converted furniture workshop where he works as a design director.
Born and bred in Orlando, Florida where it is hot and humid for most of the year, Sugiuchi was excited about the fact that he was wearing a jacket for crisp fall weather that day. "?I think Baltimore's great. Orlando is a very new city. Baltimore is very old and decayed and has lots of things falling apart and lots of cool people. And I like seasons. Big fan of the seasons."
Growing up, this extremely talented designer says humbly, "I was just a kid who could draw." It wasn't until he graduated from the University of Central Florida's design program that Sugiuchi found that design could be really interesting.
"It was a revelation when I realized design isn't just Pizza Hut coupons," said Sugiuchi. "It can be anything from film titles to movie posters."
When he isn't working at Eisner, Sugiuchi does free-lance work on the side, "whatever I can squeak out." He prides himself on being a flexible designer. "I don't really have a style," he says. "I try to solve the design problem by using whatever style is appropriate to the project." His strength as an artist comes from this individual attention and his constant awareness of pop culture. "I am a big library geek. I try to pick up influences everywhere. As a designer you have to be a cultural sponge, see value in everything and constantly seek information."
His usual clients are bands and community events like HampdenFest, and has a long running relationship with local bookstore, Atomic Books.
Rachel Whang, owner of Atomic, says, "We just let Scott do whatever he wants. I don't think he's ever come up with anything we don't like."
She also explained that posters simply make sense as a method of communication for Atomic's purposes. "We use posters to promote our events because we're an alternative bookstore with focuses on pop culture and the underground, and lowbrow art is where a lot of our clientele start from. It's an aesthetic we're into."
Sugiuchi elaborates on the connection between poster art and the underground saying, "Posters have a pretty long running modern history as a medium. They're probably not as effective as they used to be because of mass communication today, but you still see old school R&B posters peeling off walls in lower income areas like Greenmount. It's a populist art form, designed with the masses in mind.
Anyone who sees a poster becomes the audience The whole world is your gallery. It's like graffiti in that way. It can be enjoyed or hated by everyone, and it's nice to be part of that, especially in terms of music posters."
The poster's classification as art form or advertisment isn't always clear. As Sugiuchi reasons, posters exist only because they are commissioned. "I'm not a fine artist," he says. Indeed, a poster created without an event or promotion in mind is usually just called a drawing or a painting.
Yet at the same time, posters can be seen gracing the walls of college dorms and apartments across the world whereas paintings and drawings wouldusually take their place in other settings. Students, however, cannot usually afford to buy the latest piece of fine art from the local gallery.
Instead, concert posters, vintage ads for French liquers and even ads ripped straight out of the pages of fashion magazines are the wall decoration choice of youth everywhere.
"You don't have to be a zillionaire to have art," says Sugiuchi. Yet fans of underground poster art are often as serious as fine art collectors. "A guy from Germany once ttracked me down to buy a copy of a poster I had made," recounts Sugiuchi. "Things like that are more rewarding than money. And the best honor you can recive as a poster artist is that someone will steal your poster."
I have to admit, I kept a copy from my stack of HampdenFest posters that morning and today it hangs proudly over my desk.
