Seattle Havana Tehran Poster Show

Huge thanks to photographer Melanie Masson for volunteering to document Seattle (in the midst of a construction boom) and a few of its designers. The premier SHT Show at Seattle Center featured a looping slideshow with photos from Havana, Tehran, and those cities’ designers. Now that the exhibit is hitting the road, we realized it was time to turn the camera on ourselves. She captured iconic images of our city—the gorgeous and the mundane—to share with Cuban and Iranian audiences. The Seattle designers she photographed include Kelsey & David Gallow at Fogland Studios (above), Jeff Kleinsmith & Sasha Barr at Sub Pop, Coby Schultz & Barry Ament at Ames Bros, Chelsea Wirtz, C.M. Ruiz & Derek Vander Griend at Wesley School for Girls. Melanie is traveling to Havana for the SHT Show opening on April 26, camera in hand. We look forward to sharing more of her photos soon.

Our Cuba opening as part of Havana’s Festival del Cartel is coming up fast! The show kicks off with an opening party starting 5pm at a prominent gallery on the waterfront, Centro Hispanoamericano de Cultura, Malecón 17, between Prado & Capdevila Streets, Havana, Cuba. In addition to the exhibit, curators Smith and Menéndez will also give a talk about their collaboration at 10 a.m., April 27 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Museum of Fine Arts) in the Edificio de Arte Universal: Hemiciclo (Universal Art Building). A group of about 15 Seattle designers and exhibit supporters will travel to Havana for the opening and have a number of projects of their own—including the mounting of two Seattle-only poster shows at Clandestina and running a free solar-powered silkscreen workshop on Saturday April 30. More information can be found on The SHT Show’s Facebook page.

Photo © Morgen Schuler

Don’t miss the inaugural opening of the SHT show in Seattle. This Friday is Bumbershoot’s  free arts preview, 3-8pm, inside the Seattle Center’s International Fountain Pavilion, no festival ticket required. Come early! At 3pm Daniel & Pepe will conduct a curator’s walk through of the exhibit, speaking about their process and taking questions. The show is only up through Monday, Labor Day, before traveling to Havana and Tehran in 2016.

Sarah Cass of Seattle’s own record label Sub Pop, has created a special playlist for our friends abroad. Included in her playlist are at least three bands featured in exhibit posters from Seattle: Mudhoney, Dum Dum Girls, and Rose Windows. Have a listen:

“Before I ever worked at Sub Pop, lived in Seattle, became involved in the Northwest music scene, or even discovered Sub Pop, there was the music: this music. I heard bands through mix CDs and tapes passed between friends, and they got me interested in this place, this label, this scene that has become so much a part of my life—a part of my life that I treasure. I want to pass these songs along to anyone else out there, in search of good music to listen to, connect to, experience. These are songs that have meant so much to me over the years, and they are ripe for new discovery all the time, as well as ideal for listening to day after day after day. I would like to pass these songs along to listeners in Havana and Tehran who might not know Seattle, Sub Pop, and our music, as well as to those seasoned experts, as an offering of what it is that makes us love where we live and our vibrant music and arts community.”

—Sarah Cass

Todos los carteles de Seattle en este “SHT Show” son de su muy concurrida escena de rock. Cuba es conocida por sus ritmos contagiosos y bailes sensuales. Teherán seguramente tiene también un fuerte carácter musical, mezcla de tradiciones y sonoridades contemporáneas. ¡Pero ninguno de los carteles muestra un instrumento o una nota musical! Salvo un pequeño clarinete que la cubana Michele Miyares dejó caer en una esquina de su cartel sobre crítica de cine…

Parece que los diseñadores evitan mostrar la imagen de los instrumentos, o estarán ya cansados de ellos. Hay pájaros que presumiblemente cantan, pies que suenan al andar y los rostros de dos notables voces femeninas, Blondie y Celia Cruz. Hay gestos de dolor, estampidas de caballos y composiciones que parecen sonar alto: la música no está en los instrumentos sino en el color y la forma de estos carteles.

We’re thrilled to announce that SHT Show co-curator Pepe Menéndez will travel to Seattle for Bumbershoot from Cuba. Pepe, aka José Alberto Menéndez Sigarroa, is both a graphic designer and curator of design projects. He’s a graduate of Havana’s ISDI, Instituto Superior de Diseño Industrial, and has been the Design Director of Casa de las Américas since 1999, one of Cuba’s most significant cultural institutions. In 2007 Menéndez founded CACa, Club de Amigos del Cartel (Friends of the Poster Club), an informal yet serious space in which the new generation of Cuban poster artists meet to interact, discuss, challenge, and learn from one another.

According to Pepe “I frequently present Cuban posters to the public in Havana and other cities worldwide. But I have never participated in an idea like SHT Show: posters from three cities so distant from each other! It’s been a challenge to find visual relations in the contemporary creations of Seattle, Tehran and Havana to create these ‘triplets,’ but the challenge was great fun.”

Pepe was co-curator of The Seattle-Havana Poster Show which opened at Bumbershoot in 2007 before traveling to Havana’s El Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales (CDAV) in 2008. This will be Pepe’s first visit to Seattle. Details of an curator’s tour with both Pepe to be announced soon. Thanks to Humanities Washington and Tether for supporting Pepe’s visit.

Long-running KEXP DJ Quilty 3000. has deftly coerced a solid selection of Northwest faves into our Spotify playlist. Her picks, ranging from Hendrix to Tacocat, complete the Seattle-Havana-Tehran musical triumvirate. Our list, previously loaded with gems from Havana and Tehran by KEXP’s WoPop Dj Darek Mazzone, will serve as our Bumbershoot exhibit soundtrack. Play their selects on shuffle and embrace the urge to wear flannel while sipping a Cuba Libre and eating a kebab.

Bumbershoot, Seattle’s largest music and and arts festival, officially announced today that The Seattle-Havana-Tehran Poster Show will be part of its 2015 arts line-up. Coming on the heels of the recent “Iran Deal” and the synched openings U.S. and Cuban embassies in each other’s countries, we’re thrilled to usher in a new spirit of mutual cooperation by bringing current work by designers from Iran and Cuba to Seattle. This series was founded by individuals working together cross-culturally to promote understanding—despite any barriers—and the response from Bumbershoot audiences has always been overwhelmingly positive.

It’s wonderfully satisfying when Bumbershoot visitors see art from Iran and Cuba for the first time. The posters may be foreign, even illegible, but their images—the impressions they make—underline our commonalities. The crafted visuals reinforce our humanity, our universal desire to express something important, profound or just plain funny. The initial impression may be of something foreign, but the takeaway is an appreciation of those behind the work, an invisible audience we may never meet but can wholeheartedly agree with in a moment of mutual seeing.