Each year, one aspect of the Allan Hancock College dance program’s annual spring and fall dance concerts gets overlooked.
As performers practice and teams of people pay attention to every nuance of each upcoming show, posters go up all over town. Those posters are works of art themselves and make up a special part of the program that doesn’t get highlighted—until now.
A special retrospective exhibit of 37 dance posters, titled “Pirouettes, Pixels, and Posters,” will be on display at the college’s Foxworthy Gallery at the Santa Maria campus.
Along with the posters, a collection of dance shoes and some of the cameras used to take the earlier photos will also be on display, along with a synopsis detailing the design steps required to achieve the finished look of the more recent posters.
The art posters are created every year to promote Dance Spectrum and Dimensions in Dance. The poster collection dates from 1976 to the present and showcases the evolution of design styles and production techniques, ranging from silk screening to color offset printing to full-color digital printing.
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Gallery director Marti Fast said the posters were all created with varying techniques, but they all have an artistic quality to them.
“The consistency of the art and the advances of the printing processes and the advances in Photoshop have all changed,” she said, “but the constant hum through the posters is of excellence.”
Some of the posters have even won awards for design. One sheet won “Best of Year” in In-Print’s annual national competition, beating out competitors like Walmart, Budweiser and Black and Decker.
The poster process is a collaborative one, Fast said. Candace Rivera, publicist for the dance program, collaborates with a photographer and the show director. They take their ideas to Dave Richards, who works up the graphics. The project lands on the desk of Gorden Rivera, who heads up the graphics department and has printing expertise.
“I call them the unsung heroes,” Fast said of the team. “We’ve all had to collaborate with others. Sometimes there’s chemistry, and sometimes not, but this has always been great chemistry.”
Arts Editor Shelly Cone is a frequent poster online. Contact her at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 24-31, 2011.