By the Skin of Our Teeth

Jason Noto, Doug Cunningham

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062348623
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culture populaire dans l'art

A lush, full-color, beautifully designed visual history that brings to life the innovative and creative world of Morning Breath Co. Inc., the Brooklyn-based boutique design studio whose collaborators including top musical artists (from Jay Z to the Foo Fighters) as well as such top brands as Vans and Adidas.

In 1996 while working at the in-house design department at Think Skateboards in San Francisco, creatives Doug Cunningham and Jason Noto forged a collaborative style that would transform into a remarkable partnership: an endeavor they called Morning Breath.

Working with some of the top music artists and corporations, Morning Breath Co. Inc. has made its aesthetic mark on pop culture, devising Grammy-nominated and award-winning work that has been featured in art shows across the country. Incorporating passé pop culture art elements into fresh, original imagery, this go-to design team for the Foo Fighters has produced an amazing portfolio of artwork for a wide range of clients, including Absolut Vodka, Solomon Snowboards, MTV, Pepsi, Kanye West, Eminem, Jay Z, Slayer, Queens of the Stone Age, Vans, and Adidas.

In By the Skin of Our Teeth: The Art and Design of Morning Breath, Cunningham and Noto tell the story of Morning Breath in this collection showcasing their artwork and designs, from music packaging, T-shirts, and posters to fine arts, lifestyle, and products. They also spotlight the artistic influences and roots that have shaped them, including graffiti art, silk screening, computer graphics, collaging, painting, and fine arts.

Filled with dozens of full-color images, By the Skin of Our Teeth is an invaluable display of Morning Breath's provocative, imaginative, and original style—a combination of the dream-like and the quotidian—that has captured the attention of artists, designers, and pop culture lovers everywhere.

The list of contributors consists of a wide-range of writers and artists, all of whom help put the creative work of Morning Breath in narrative perspective. Contributors include Bill Adler, Jeremy Fish, Geoff Peveto, Evan Pricco, and Eddie Zammit.

POSTERS

Studio squeegees

Photo Credit: Mathew Zucker

GOOD THINGS COME TO THOSE WHO SILK SCREEN

BY GEOFF PEVETO

My path to designing and printing rock posters was accidental at best. In college I was a studio art major with a focus in ceramics. But all my life I loved music and the DIY aspect of being in a band and Xeroxing your own fliers for shows attended by a few enthusiastic friends. After a while, friends in bands asked me to design their fliers and t-shirts, and eventually one or two put out a record and needed some art. Considering most of my payment for this work was in beer, making rock posters didn’t seem like a viable career.

What that essentially free work did for me, however, was connect me to a lot of amazing people who were independently creating scenes in their home towns across the country. Before the Internet, I suppose most people who were involved in movements like these felt they were doing something unique and maybe even unprecedented. Unless you had means to travel you might not realize that the shit you’re doing in your town was happening in a lot of other places too. But the renewed interest in silk screen rock posters happened to crop up at the beginning of the new millennium and the new-fangled Internet helped people like me connect a lot of dots, first locally and nationally and then, eventually, internationally through a poster archive website called gigposters.com.

Flatstock and The American Poster Institute grew out of these connections. And they grew as far as Hamburg and Barcelona, pulling independent creative types from all over the world into a discussion around the importance of hand printed serigraphs, a medium that was at risk of becoming obsolete just a decade earlier. Thanks to Flatstock you got to talk to a ton of people, artists, students, and enthusiasts, who were now interested in the silk screening. Each subsequent Flatstock inspired more and more new people to start printing their own work.

This new community of artists spawned a much broader and more meaningful conversation about technique and practice. Online, master printers like Andy MacDougal and Luther Davis told you exactly what you were doing right or wrong. Art Chantry and Frank Kozik, arguably the two most influential pioneers of the modern rock poster style, told “back in the day” stories and went at each other in a love/hate spectacle. You also had the opportunity to talk shop with “new movement” folks like Aesthetic Appara...