🎧 Power of Place Episode #42 | Louder Than Art – Art Chantry

Power of Place - Stories of the Pacific Northwest

Join us in this episode (the first of a two-part series) for a conversation with graphic designer Art Chantry, a national treasure, whose posters are collected by The Smithsonian and The Louvre. Opening with childhood memories of Parkland on the fringes of Tacoma, Washington, Art describes a restless educational path that eventually brought him to Bellingham. He shares experiences of his subsequent arrival to Seattle in the 1980’s, including street observations that shaped his aesthetics. He tells of art directing the music biweekly magazine The Rocket on a shoestring budget before launching a one-man graphic design firm, churning out hundreds of posters, logos and album covers for rock bands including Soundgarden and Mudhoney associated with Sub Pop, Estrus and other home-grown record labels. Art’s stories reveal the genesis of a vital visual lexicon—subversive, populist and modern—that simultaneously reflected and transformed the Pacific Northwest: From a backwater for “losers,” to the forefront of global popular culture in the 1990’s and beyond. "It’s black and white. It's scrappy. There’s not a straight line on the whole goddamn thing. It looks like it was cut and pasted together out of chunks of Xerox junk. It is just an atrocious mess. And it’s beautiful…. It’s so alive—You still look at it and it makes your heart jump!” ~ Art Chantry