50 Years of Jazz Fest: The Posters of Jazz Fest

April 30, 2019

Scenic portraitist Scott Guion’s 2019 Jazz Fest poster, inspired by the classic photo “A Great Day in Harlem.” This complex family portrait was realized in 18 colors by chromist Luther Davis at the Powerhouse Arts atelier. (©2019 art4now inc & NOJ&HFF Inc. TM NOJ&HFF, Inc. Published by art4now.com)

America’s most iconic music festival has also left its mark on the art world.

This article is part of our 50 Years of Jazz Fest celebration and appears in the special Collector’s Edition April/May 2019 issue of Relix. Subscribe here using code NOLA50 and get 20% off.

What began as an entrepreneurship class project by Bud Brimberg in his last year at Tulane University Law School has become the most collected print series in the world.

The project was conceived as a fundraiser for the not-for-profit New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival Foundation, and, now, more than half a million of these limited-edition silkscreen posters hang globally. Clearly, it has succeeded well beyond its modest beginnings, contributing more than $25 million to the Foundation’s programs since 1975. The project has expanded to include artist-signed prints, subject- and artist-signed “remarqued” prints, and subject- and artist-signed and artist-over-painted canvases, as well as an artist-created line of tropical clothing, now known as BayouWear.

Art4Now’s goal remains publishing limited- edition silkscreen prints at accessible prices. It does so by adapting innovative fine-art techniques to longer-run productions. The company attracts world-class artists, whose originals and prints often sell for thousands of dollars, by producing “mere” posters–long considered a lesser art form– that don’t compete with the artist’s “fine-art” output but are equally valid. Most editions sell out in the year they are produced.

The entire poster series, as well as the latest from the BayouWear collection, can be seen at art4now.com.

CHRONOLOGY:

1975: Jazz Fest is responsible for the first limited-edition numbered silkscreen poster created for any festival.

1976: A year later, Jazz Fest added an artist-signed edition.

1980: This year’s edition was the first poster, of any kind, to be featured on the cover of the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress.

1981: At the dawn of the 1980s, HowAhYa shirts were introduced as a type of artist-created clothing.

1989: The first performer-signed “Remarque” print, featuring Fats Domino, is introduced.

1995: Innovative techniques that allow full-spectrum paintings to be interpreted as original prints without the use of photographic technologies are developed.

1998: HowAhYa shirt evolves into the expanded BayouWear line of tropical clothing.

2000: The C-Marque artist-over-painted canvas edition is introduced.

2001: For the first time, all editions of a poster sell out on the first day of the festival.

2010: Tony Bennett becomes the first celebrity artist to paint a poster subject—Louis Prima.

2015: Modern innovation allows for a 3-D poster that’s beautiful without special glasses yet still startlingly dimensional when viewed with the supplied clear glasses.

2019: The 50th anniversary “Family Portrait” (see above) encapsulates the history of the festival and its poster art, as well as New Orleans music and architecture, in a single image.

1976