Yee-Haw Industries

One of my favorite things about Knoxvegas is that so much of its advertising straddles the line between art and commercial design effectively -this includes, of course, a high-quality poster making establishment known as Yee-Haw Industries. While most towns' local businesses are relegated to nothing more than photocopied Microsoft documents or handdrawn psuedo-grafitti, or, if they're really lucky, that one, pseudo-Jamaican style of print with three, vaguely blurred colors (yellow, red, and green) overlain with black ink, we here in the Orange City have an alternative. Knoxville has artisans.

Oh, how delightfully "guildish!"

Yee-Haw Industries has been pumping out fine linotypes and woodbock prints for ten years. By the by, a linotype is a print made by using carved linoleum as a plate. I did some in college, though I was substantially better at drypoints or monotypes - somewhere, though, I hope my friend Michelle Lester is still making linotypes. Damn skippy she had a gift.

Regardless, I won't bore you with details about Yee-Haw (there homepage has all the details you could possible want), except to say that if you're looking for something to hang in the old living room, why settle on a photograph of original art when you can order one of Yee-Haw's prints for close to the same price (well, in some instances at least).

No, ghosts of the Vienna Secession, the poster is not dead.

Dig:








Impressive stuff, eh? Functional, beautiful, art-deco with a frontier twist - Yee-Haw's work is incredible. And, all of these works are, by the way, available for sale on the Yee-Haw website.

As for other links, well, I suggest this EconoCulture interview, or this blurb from the Knoxville Museum of Fine Art (which is a helluva' small museum, frankly), where, coincidently, the folks at Yee-Haw have a show going on right now. Other neat blurbs include this one from Ptelevision, and this one from the Savannah College of Art and Design (where my pal Ahart Powers went - I need to call him - he and Christopher are the guys who went with me to see Young Guns II in the movie theater that time - you know, with the JujuBees).

Fun on the bun.