Copy/Paste/Print/Repeat: Mike King & the Art of the Gig Poster

Mike King is America’s most prolific gig poster artist. What began as a means of promoting his own bands’ shows in the late 1970s gradually morphed into a full-time specialty in the art of the eye-catching concert poster. Today, there are few major venues or bands that have not worked with him—his imagery has saturated into the tapestry of American music culture, appearing on album covers, t-shirts, and, most importantly, posters. 

The posters in this exhibition are a mere slice of a much larger visual pie—a taste of some of Mike’s rarest posters from a thirty-year spread within his ongoing career. They highlight shifts in both the available technology for making posters, from fully analog to digital, as well as how the function of gig posters has evolved from advertisements to collectible merchandise. Rather than being presented strictly chronologically, each section focuses on Mike’s process for creating the paste-up or digital file necessary to produce each type of poster.