Metro Pulse/Cover/Revival of the Letterpress

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Art Makes Us Merry

The gang at Yee-Haw is in their third season of presenting its "Art for the People" holiday show and sale. The event is a Christmas shopping extravaganza that started Nov. 21 and runs through Dec. 23.

This year's show occupies the 5th floor of the Woodruff's Building, the home of co-sponsor the Downtown Grill & Brewery. Metro Pulse is also a co-sponsor.

The work of more than 45 artists, craftspeople and collectors on display ranges from metal assemblages, folk art, Christmas ornaments, original Appalachian videos & CDs, handcrafted jewelry, paintings, sculpture, hand-pulled prints and holiday cards, lamps and handmade fiberglass shades, concrete and mosaic vessels, vintage turntables, and salt & soda-fired functional pottery.

There are duct tape wallets and accessories (looka here, Henry!), 'zines and stickers, baby blankets & Yee-Haw tiny baby gowns, baby art, rocketships made of household items, fancy frames, yard art, voodoo dolls and shrine candles, the painted word, photographs, coasters, posters, 2004 calendars, poetry, handmade books and albums, tee-shirts, one-of-a-kind handbags and tote bags, toys, mobiles, wall hangings...take a deep breath here...and more, including some paintings and drawings by kids under age 8 that are arriving this week.

The regional and national artists and art organizations represented include Jimmy Descant, Purgatory Pie Press, Alison Moffett, Joel Trussell, Lil Kenny, Michele Richards, Kem Alexander, Lisa Norris, Meg Reilley, Appalshop, Suzanne Pugh, Melody Reeves, John Vasquez, Abe Lincoln Jr., Suzie Millions, Jill Colquitt, Morgan and Pat Fitch, Blair Richardson, Amy Campbell, Bryan Baker, R.Land, Medley Wewerka, Mark Elliott, Spivey, and Shannon O'Connor.

Julie Belcher, Yee-Haw's irrepressible co-owner, says that smart shoppers will get to the show early in the season, or "before the masses pounce."

Shopping hours at the show are noon-6 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays, with extended hours to 9 p.m. on Fridays. Special events are scheduled every Friday evening. This week it's The Gypsy hands tribal belly dancers at 8 p.m..

—B.H.

An ancient art form is still art, and it's a growing trend in printing

by Barry Henderson

Kevin Bradley's hands are rough and worn and stained with ink. Yet they move with the skill of a surgeon, steadied by an artistic temperament that has changed a growing corner of the world of printing.

Bradley smoothes a spatula of ink lovingly onto the roller of an aged flatbed press, explaining that the images set by hand in the press's galley take more ink than the hand-carved, hand-shaped wooden and lead type. "It's knowing how to apply the ink," he says. He waits a moment and cranks the old press. A poster appears in brown tones, with a winking wolf in a top hat and bow tie, announcing that it's "Showtime" for the third annual "Art for the People" Holiday Show for Knoxville.

The show began last Friday in a gaping, charming, brick-walled loft space above the Downtown Grill and Brewery on Gay Street, across the street from Yee-Haw Industries, the letterpress shop founded, owned and run by Bradley and his partner, Julie Belcher.

The resurgence of the ancient letterpress technique began more than 10 years before, when Bradley was studying in University of Tennessee's School of Art. A Greeneville native, he wanted to be, and still is, a painter by avocation. But the graphic design courses there at UT introduced him to printmaking, and he was infatuated, and still is, with the process. He went to work for Hatch Show Print in Nashville, developing and sharpening his skill in a letterpress shop that was a relic, more than a century old, and such a nearly unique example of the craft that it's now a part of the Country Music Hall of Fame there.

"It's 15th century technology in the digital age," says Belcher, who's still starry-eyed over the concept and its revival, which she and Bradley have coaxed into the nation's consciousness with the evangelizing fervor of an ongoing religious tent show. Yee-Haw puts out posters, signs, greeting cards, invitations, announcements, corporate logos, business cards, ads, covers for newspaper inserts and CDs, even a print design for a deck of playing cards, all for an astonishing array of clients, almost a third of whom are in the music industry. The business has broadened out from about 70 percent music and entertainment posters in 1998 to about 30 percent of the same today.

Its anchor is the little storefront shop at 413 S. Gay St., an address that is putting Knoxville on the international map in a way no comparably small business has done in recent memory. That's small, as in Bradley, Belcher, and five other part-time people, two of whom are interns. The company has had a worldwide impact.

"Yee-Haw represents not only a revival in letterpress, itself an interesting phenom in the digital typographic age, but it's also an exemplar in the untutored design movement, which is a reaction to the slick professionalism the computer allows," says Steven Heller, a New York critic and author of Graphic Design Reader and more than 90 books on the subject of graphic design.

"Yee-Haw builds on an American printing tradition and adds its own wit and humor," Heller says, and Bradley, with an air of near amazement, says that about half the hits on the Yee-Haw website, www.yeehawindustries.com, are now coming in from overseas. "People from other countries say our work is 'so American,' and that's very gratifying," Bradley says.

The American Institute of Graphic Arts' Journal of Graphic Design has called the Yee-Haw look "both astute and rough-hewn" in a flattering article. If that means Lincolnesque, it was really flattering, but it seems perfectly accurate. Other national publications, including the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, have published congratulatory articles on the Knoxville upstart, as has Southern Living.

The reason Yee-Haw's concept works as well as it does is pretty simple. Though the couple loves printing, they are artists first. Belcher spent years in graphic design for such institutions as Seventeen magazine. She also picked up a master's degree in design from New York's School of Visual Arts. A Corbin, Ky., native, she got to know Bradley at UT. When he left Nashville it was for Corbin, where he says he had talked her into setting up their first printing shop in a tiny workshed behind her mother's home. From their first press, using Bradley's paintings for illustrations, they turned out posters they took to New York, hawking on the street for walking-around money and incidental expenses. They developed an early following and realized they were onto something that could support them in the manner to which they'd become accustomed, which was hand-to-mouth, but fun.

He's now 40, and she's 39. They're partners "in every way," as Belcher puts it. They maintain an aura of newlyweds. They bait one another almost incessantly during a series of Metro Pulse interviews. They grin and groan as they badger and kid. They live, work, travel, teach, and judge contests together. It's partly their calling that keeps them close. They view their business as art, making little money from it that they don't plow back into more type, more presses-—most of which need restoring—and more improvements to the shop/studio. To say it's a labor of love is an understatement.

Bradley says he got into printing "out of love from the get-go." The appeal, he says, is twofold. "It's creating something from start to finish with no middleman, and it's very tactile—all the moveable blocks. You have to organize it and handle each piece...." Belcher displays the sentiment that arises from the tactile sense as she studies and strokes each piece of wooden type, arranging it in a hand galley to spell out, "Yee-Haw." She talks about the way the art of printing affects their lives. "It's the thrill and satisfaction of coming in in the morning and having something done tonight, something you can reflect on and feel you've done well."

They do their magic in a building the couple bought from David Dewhirst in 1997 for a now amazing $73,000. That was before Gay Street was staging a comeback. It was before the Millers Building restoration or much of anything else there. The couple has spent much more than that putting it into reasonable shape. Flooring, plumbing, rewiring, heat and air, a roof, and so on, and on. It's a continuing process that they started, part-time on weekends, throughout 1998 before they opened its doors to Knoxville and the world in '99. Bradley calls it "the first new letterpress shop in this country in 50 years."

Inside, it looks sort of like an early 2Oth century print shop, but its first impression—that of an incredible clutter of presses, type cabinets, ink supplies paper stacks and posterwork, interspersed with pieces of collectible pop art—is a little misleading.

"It's organized," says Belcher, "Kevin knows where everything is." His mind must have lots of random access memory. It's a pretty remarkable feat in that they have collected upwards of 500 lead type fonts in more than a thousand sizes in a dizzying assortment of designs, from the archaic to the artsy to the modern. Their wood type, mostly carved of hard end-grain maple to make it resilient and resistant to rot, comes in sizes from 24-point (about a third of an inch tall) to some that stand waist high, literally. The type gets even harder and is usable far longer once its has been inked several times and has absorbed a little of the chemicals that make up the ink.

Like the presses, the type has been collected from across the country. The couple has rummaged through old barns and warehouses and scrap heaps to salvage typography and presses. The shop now holds seven presses, four of them flatbeds, including a shiny new one ordered from Albuquerque at a cost of $25,000. It is capable of producing sheets 10- or 12-feet long, technically big enough to turn out billboard panels, but they have yet to get a billboard order. Type has come from all over, including a big batch from the defunct Southern Poster Co. in Atlanta, and quite a lot from retired printers who squirreled away a little of their equipment when they left the field. Some has been bought from collections, like the massive typography trove kept in Indianapolis by David Churchman, who does no commercial printing himself but is enthusiastic about such enterprises as Yee-Haw. A printing supply dealer with a 7,000-square-foot warehouse and other odd storage spaces crammed full of type and other printing materials, Churchman says of Bradley and Belcher:

"In an era of slick, photo-quality printing, it's interesting to me that someone would take a sheet of plywood, carve it with a knife, slap it on a press, and make posters, slowly, one at a time, and find a ready market for it.

"They not only found a niche, but they elbowed their way in and made a nice, big niche for themselves," Churchman says.

They aren't without their imitators, and for artists, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. Although Belcher and Bradley are eager to encourage other entrepreneurs to engage in letterpress work, they are jealous guardians of Bradley's art style. So when a former apprentice opened up Revolution Letterpress in the 100 block of S. Gay, three blocks away, and started producing posters and other materials in what they consider a Yee-Haw cloning, it was not funny to them. They don't want to talk about it. They make that abundantly clear.

Their work has impressed other Knoxville graphic art specialists, as well. Rob Heller, an assistant professor who teaches graphic design in the Journalism school at UT (and who is not related to Steve Heller, the critic and author), is of an age where he learned letterpress printing in college, he says. "One appreciates the art and craft of typography when one is forced to set type by hand, carefully lock it in place and feel the excitement when the paper is first pulled from the press.

"Technology has changed the methods of printing and design over the past 30 years, but it's nice to see the success of someone doing in the old-fashioned way.... Their techniques may be old, but their designs are fresh and contemporary," Heller says.

He calls Yee-Haw "One of Knoxville's hidden treasures," and says he sends his communications graphics teachers down to the Gay Street shop to see how things used to be done. The students get the experience of seeing the artistry of hand-carved drawings, the cheesy clip art of times long gone, multiple type faces, and dingbats (symbols or ornaments, as opposed to letters). Heller calls the Yee-Haw style a "funky look that reminds of the past at the same time as it breaks new ground in the present."

The slight imperfections that are evident in the finished printing make each piece both extraordinary and hard to duplicate, even with the flexibility of the computer. Yee-Haw's artistic stylizations, added to the uniqueness of every poster or card, plus the retro appeal, sum up the rise in its popularity.

Yee-Haw does use computers, but they are for transmitting samples, taking orders, and billing, not for composing the images that become the finished product. Bradley's paintings of performers grace many of their products, most of which are ordered on chipboard, the lowest grade of paper, for the super-glossless effect. Nowadays, some of their orders for invitations, cards and the like, specify handmade French paper that ups the cost but has its own affected effect.

Being close to the music industry, where posters are still the street-corner heralds of concerts and performances, Yee-Haw has developed a set of clients whose featured performers who are household names in country, rock, jazz, and blues.

Some of those featured on Yee-Haw posters include, in no particular order:

Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lucinda Williams, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, Superchunk, Jimbo Mathus, Greg Brown, Southern Culture on the Skids, Trey Anastasio, James Brown, ZZ Top, George "Possum" Jones, Steve Earl (the deck of cards bore Earl's image) and the late greats; Hank Willams, Tammy "American Goddess" Wynette, Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, Robert Johnson, Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Conway "Country Action Figure" Twitty, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Sammy Davis, Jr., and the list goes on.

Other Yee-Haw posters have touted or poked fun at such people or items of interest as Earl the Singing Chicken, Mojo Cologne, Cousin Crispy's XXX Pleasure Powder, Evel Knievel, and the like. And the client list also boasts such institutions as the Wall Street Journal, Ralph Lauren (for a store opening in Paris), and the Austin American-Statesman.

The word, and their work, is obviously getting around.

Before settling on Knoxville, they scouted out more artsy locations, including Asheville and Chapel Hill. But they settled on East Tennessee's regional capital because of cost and familiarity. They loved it here in college. It's home now, for sure. "You couldn't run us out," Bradley says.

That's a good thing for the city, its reputation, and its downtown. "Knoxville has benefited from the work that Yee-Haw does," says UT's Heller, "Posters, invitations, newspaper ads, all show the influence of these guys. Maybe we can call it the 'Knoxville look."