I knew Jay Ryan’s work before I knew who was responsible for it. Bands like Shellac and Shipping News sold his silk-screened posters on the road, so after a while, I recognized these cartoon animals—squirrels, raccoons, walruses—that were cute but somehow slightly sinister. It wasn’t until 2001 that I solved the pre-internet puzzle: the person who sold me a poster of a fractured bike at a Fugazi/Shellac/the Ex show was the artist—and the same guy who played (and still plays) bass for Dianogah, the Chicago band I’d seen years earlier.
The Bird Machine, Ryan’s illustration studio, has grown exponentially since my introduction to him. Once a part-time basement endeavor fit in between teaching gigs at Columbia College, the Bird Machine has become a proper shop based in Skokie, with a few employees to help the high demand. The reputation surrounding Ryan’s work has expanded, too, with the likes of Sonic Youth, St. Vincent, and Dinosaur Jr. sitting on his client list alongside Cards Against Humanity and Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution (Ryan did the cover). (Full disclosure: Ryan has made posters in the past for Pitchfork events.)
Ryan’s prolific work has been anthologized three times along the way: 2005’s 100 Posters / 134 Squirrels, 2009’s Animals And Objects In And Out of Water, and out this week, No One Told Me Not To Do This: Selected Screenprints 2009-2015. I spoke to Ryan by phone about how specifically he collaborates with the musicians who approach him, and why the poster game is susceptible to nostalgia fatigue, much like every other aspect of the music industry.
Pitchfork: You were playing music already when you started making posters for bands. How did that come about?
Jay Ryan: I was making posters for Dianogah, for our friends. Being in my mid-twenties, most of our friends played in bands. We’d spend a lot of time playing at the Empty Bottle or at Lounge Ax [in Chicago], and these venues would ask for posters for other shows I wasn’t playing on. I was working the office at the Empty Bottle for a while there. It was an organic build working for friends and friends of friends. It was complicated by the advent of people starting to use the internet regularly. By 2001, I was well established online, but that wouldn’t have been the case in ’99. It was a whole new way to have people find my work that hadn’t been present three years earlier.
When bands get in touch about you doing a poster, do they generally have an idea of what they want, or are you left to your devices and your own fandom to figure out the direction?
More the latter. Generally, and very wonderfully, I get offered more work than I can do, so unfortunately I have to turn work down all the time. Usually I get to work with someone I like—you can get a pretty good sense of my music taste by seeing who I’ve worked for. I can feel good about knowing I’m interested in what they’re doing to the degree that I can do a good job on the poster.
For your average concert poster, I don’t really take a lot of art direction. I figure if I know the band well enough to be able to work for them, I like to think I have an idea for a good visual. I do like a little bit of light tone suggestion. For example, right now, I’m working on a poster for Andrew Bird, a series of holidays shows he does annually called Gezelligheid. It’s a winter thing, and the only guidance they gave me was that they wanted a warm and cozy sort of image. That’s a great bit of art direction for me.
Ryan says: “My first foray into CMYK printing, with all the little tiny dots, plus a white underprint and an extra layer of black. Steve Albini from Shellac suggested that the poster should depict a hockey game between the bands, but in the style of Johannes Vermeer. I was flummoxed for a bit, unsure that I could replicate the style of an old master, especially using the limited toolbox of screenprinting, but eventually decided to just insert some hockey players into Vermeer’s masterpiece ‘The Milkmaid,’ which I doubt was the effect Steve had originally been looking for.”
Did you ever have a Boston hardcore phase?
Boston hardcore phase? Not really. I had a little bit of a D.C. hardcore phase. Minor Threat’s still with me.
I think of that Boston hardcore band SS Decontrol, how they would press a few thousand copies of whatever album they were on and never repressed it again. The thought was that you were either there and you got the record, or you weren’t. Your policy of printing up one batch of posters and then moving onto the next one struck me as being a little like that.
I don’t know if that aspect applies, of “you weren’t there, and this is just for the people who happened to be at the right time or could get to the show.” For me, I don’t necessarily want to get into the memorabilia business. It’s one thing to make a poster for a show, but when you’re reprinting Jimi Hendrix posters 45 years later—there’s a place for that, but I don’t want to be in that place.
Also, in selling a poster after the concert, I’ve signed the prints—one of 300 or whatever the number is—and there’s a commitment to the people who bought the print that there are 300 of these. If you got one, you got one, and if you didn’t, we’re not going to have more.
The other side of it is that since there’s a band’s name on there—if I make a Pearl Jam poster or something, you’re also making a commitment that you’re not making a bottomless pit of Pearl Jam posters that you can continue to sell. The band retains ownership of their name. It’s just cleaner to do them once, know how many there are, and be done.
There’s the commitment to the bands that you’re going to have a limited run, but your books allow people to look at your stuff in a way that’s not, like you said, creating a bottomless pit.
I’m just pulling names out here—if I’m reprinting St. Vincent posters over and over for years, that’s obviously hurting St. Vincent in some way, taking some fraction of the money that would be spent on St. Vincent merchandise. Whereas if I’m putting out a book, I don’t think someone’s going to buy the book because there’s a picture of a St. Vincent poster in there. I think you’re buying the book because it’s a body of work that’s been made, and you know some of the bands—it’s not band merch in the same way that a poster would be.
Ryan says: “Pavement reunited after being broken up for about a decade. I treated the different compartments as separate posters with different colors, and made literal references to several of the band’s lyrics.”
There’s a through-line from the early stuff to the present, in part because of the lettering that you do. Also by having recurring animals in your work—you’re not just doing a skull or a hot rod or something else fairly common. How conscious were those choices when you started, or was it an evolution to reach a distinct style?
A little bit of both. I was lucky to learn to make work from Steve Walters at Screwball Press, who had his own very hand-done, computer-illiterate style. It was based on having an Xacto knife and a scrap imagery to compile and photocopy and build on. I pulled from that, but I added my own illustrative style.
The general ecosystem of posters is different than it was 15, 20 years ago. When I was getting into this kind of work, there was a preponderance of hot rod/skull/Frankenstein imagery. People like Frank Kozik and Coop [Chris Cooper] were doing really good, interesting posters, but there were dozens of people trying to make knockoffs of that style. I had no interest in that.