By Vanessa Carr
Independent music and DIY culture can come like flashes of hope through the dark days of teenage dorkdom. For me, it was Bikini Kill’s first album on tape.
The revelation: something better is out there. And better yet, one can actually have a role in creating it.
Once a small-town kid growing up in Neenah, Wisconsin, graphic designer and poster artist Jason Munn tapped into a similar sense of inspired possibility. As a skateboarder with a crew of like-minded friends, he was influenced early on by skateboard graphics and the album art of bands like the Promise Ring and Boys Life.
Munn, 32, now lives in Oakland, where he has been running The Small Stakes design studio since 2003. He continues to draw stylistic and psychic inspiration from punk’s handmade aesthetic and DIY ethos.
Munn’s stunningly precise silkscreen show posters for artists, ranging from Battles and LCD Soundsystem to Sufjan Stevens and Modest Mouse, have made him a minor celebrity among design nerds and indie rockers alike. Not that you’d ever know it: in person he is soft-spoken and humble, certainly not the kind of guy who goes around telling people, for instance, that his work is part of the San Francisco MoMA’s permanent collection, or that it’s regularly featured in PRINT Magazine and Communication Arts.
This Friday night (4/4), Munn will be selling limited edition art prints and gig posters at Bloom Screen Printing in Oakland. Munn’s prints will be on sale for $5-$25. Bloom Screen Printing posters will also be for sale.
SFBG: When did you start making music-related posters?
Jason Munn: I started in [art] school. A lot of my projects were music-related even when they weren’t supposed to be, because that was what I was interested in. I was working in another design studio at the time – after school – and at night a lot I was doing these kind of things just to do what I wanted to do and also to build up a portfolio of the kind of work that I really wanted to show people, which was not necessarily the stuff I was doing at my day job.
I moved out here in 2002, again with no plans at all. About a month after I moved out here, two people I met were booking shows in Berkeley at a place they called the Ramp. It was in the basement of this church in Berkeley, and they were doing one show a month – really great shows, a lot of local bands, and a lot of bands that will play the Fillmore when they come through now: Animal Collective, Deerhoof, Why? – a lot of local things, but also touring acts. But again, it was only one show a month, and it was only open for a year. It was essentially when I started doing posters. They asked me to do a poster for each show. I wanted to silkscreen, but I didn’t know how. I had done a little bit of silkscreening in school, so I had a real basic knowledge of it. The first job I had out here I was actually temping at a silkscreen shop – I printed the t-shirts. So basically they would burn the screens for me and I would print from home. I made a huge mess and it was a huge learning process.
I probably did six or seven posters, and then I met a guy in Oakland who was printing another job for me that I did the design work for. His name is Nat and he runs a screenprinting shop in Oakland called Bloom Screen Printing. It’s a small shop, and he basically taught me a ton about printing. I started printing my stuff there, and he was showing me lots of tricks, random things that I was having trouble with. He was looking at the stuff I was doing at home and was like, “This is what you’re doing wrong.” It was really cool. I still print there – he also prints larger jobs for me, although he is a pretty in-demand printer.
SFBG: How do you make it work financially?