Sperry Posters

Chuck Sperry lives in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where he’s made his particular style of rock poster designs for over 20 years. He operates Hangar 18, a silkscreen print studio, located in Oakland. Sperry works in San Francisco, but exhibits internationally from Athens to Argentina, Bristol to Belgrade (visited Belgrade at the invitation of The Cultural Minster of Serbia). By conducting workshops and lectures all over the planet, Sperry’s tutelage has inspired a new generation of rock poster and silkscreen artists worldwide. “Chuck has propelled the American rock poster genre to a new level of fine art status with his print work.” – Juxtapoz His artwork has been exhibited at leading art institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Fort Wayne Museum of Art; his prints have been archived in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, The Oakland Museum of California, The Fort Wayne Museum of Art, San Francisco Public Library (Main Branch), the United States Library of Congress, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has brought his rock artistry to projects for Goldenvoice, Live Nation, Virgin Megastore, Guitar Center, Random House, Harper Collins, Harvard University Press, Nylon, and Wired. He has been featured in The New York Times, New York Post, San Francisco Chronicle, The Independent, The Guardian, Herald Tribune, Le Parisien, Libération, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, l’Espresso, La Nacion, The Huffington Post, Architectural Digest, Print, Fast Company, Ms. Magazine, Purple, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Vice, NME, Spin, Relix, Hi-Fructose, Juxtapoz, Beautiful Bizarre, Widewalls, We Heart, 7×7, KQED Arts, AV Club, Slash Film, Boing Boing, SF Bay Guardian and many more. Released in early 2009, the documentary film “American Artifact” prominently features Chuck Sperry. He has been featured in documentaries for film and television in the US, Europe and Australia. One can find his art featured in many books, most notably Color x Color: The Sperry Archive 1980-2020, High Volume: The Art of Chuck Sperry, Helikon: The Muses of Chuck Sperry, Chthoneon: The Art of Chuck Sperry, The Art of Modern Rock, Peace Signs: The Anti-War Movement Illustrated, and Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo. Chuck Sperry has honed the craft of designing and hand screen printing for over 20 years to become recognized throughout the world as one of the foremost rock poster artists and printmakers. Elevating the craft to fine art, Sperry creates socio-political artwork beyond rock. He adheres to the ideal that beauty strengthens his message.

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.