I was thrilled when Chuck Sperry asked me if I wanted to do a Pub­lic Enemy poster for his Gold­en­voice series, I’m a huge Pub­lic Enemy fan from way back when. Doing a poster for a band you love isn’t always as great as it sounds, some­times you can get hung up on try­ing to get a per­fect image and idea and over­work the art. Try­ing not to over-think things, I decided to go with an old-school polit­i­cal poster, the kind of thing I was mak­ing in the 80′s when I lis­tened to P.E. con­stantly. I’ve made a ton of art over the years lis­ten­ing to that band, and felt like going back to my roots.

Some­how I think I’ve wanted to make this poster for a long time. The last time I made a Pub­lic Enemy poster it was for the Fill­more, I don’t think a riot cop with a bloody baton would have passed pre-screening over there. In par­tic­u­lar, I decided to make this poster a BART cop. BART is a Bay Area tran­sit agency who’s police force has been involved in some very ques­tion­able shoot­ings, have been han­dling them­selves pretty badly, they’ve been in the news a lot. Know­ing the band, the image seemed fit­ting, and timely.

The image is a col­lage of pieces from dif­fer­ent riot cop pho­tos, put together to make an espe­cially sin­is­ter fig­ure. I altered a lot of the small details along the way then sep­a­rated the art into 3 col­ors, stan­dard “pol­i­tics” black & red, plus a bright sil­ver… the sil­ver gives it that rock poster feel. For the vari­ants, we printed a pure cyan instead of the black plate, and used some dif­fer­ent stock. A big thanks Chuck for being the mas­ter of his press, this was an espe­cially clean run of posters.

Silkscreen poster printed by Chris Shaw & Chuck Sperry at Hangar 18, Oak­land, CA.

Pub­lic Enemy poster by Chris Shaw
August 19, 2011
Regency Ball­room — San Fran­cisco, Cal­i­for­nia
Firehouse-Goldenvoice series #139
18′ x 28″ impres­sion on 20″ x 30″ 100 lb. Cougar paper
Edi­tion of 145
Signed & Numbered

Blue Vari­ant – Pub­lic Enemy poster by Chris Shaw
20″ x 30″ on 100 lb. Cougar paper
Edi­tion of 15
Signed & Numbered

Dark Blue Vari­ant – Pub­lic Enemy poster by Chris Shaw
20″ x 30″ on Blue Linen paper
Edi­tion of 12
Signed & Numbered

Blue Pearl Vari­ant – Pub­lic Enemy poster by Chris Shaw
20″ x 30″ on Speck­led Pearl paper
Edi­tion of 4
Signed & Numbered