Always Up—Powerhouse Bridges the Gap Between Art and Music at MPMF from Powerhouse Factories on Vimeo.
At Powerhouse, we’ve been bridging the gap between the art and music scenes since we began designing and screen printing gig posters for musicians ten years ago. We count ourselves lucky to be a part of a creative community that is bursting at the seams with amazing artists, musicians and the local arts organizations that support it all. When we began thinking about how we could up our game with our MidPoint Music Festival experience this year, we knew there had to be an opportunity to serve as a catalyst and bring them all together to create something new and unique.
In our recent collaboration with our friends at Cincinnati’s 21c Museum Hotel, Contemporary Arts Center, SpringBoard, ArtWorks and MidPoint Music Festival we think we managed to do just that. We captured the culmination of all our work with these groups during the week of MPMF and are pumped to debut a video celebrating it. The video includes footage from our MPMF Poster Expo, the Powerhouse Print Lab at the SpringBoard Box Truck Carnival and Flooded, a gig poster exhibit hosted at 21c Museum Hotel Cincinnati.
The Flooded exhibit—co-curated by Eli Meiners and Michael Hurst of Cincinnati’s 21c; Joshua Mattie of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center; Pat Jones, Ben Nunery and Emily Lang of Powerhouse Factories—was a joint effort to highlight the design and print process behind crafting screen printed show posters in conjunction with MPMF. The exhibit featured seven of our local artist friends, including prints by Southpaw Prints, Cryptogram, Feralmade, Andrew Neyer, Powerhouse Factories, Keith Neltner and Rob Warnick.
To promote the exhibit in the MPMF spirit, our collaboration with 21c Museum Hotel Cincinnati continued outside of the gallery, with five secret shows with regional musicians in and around the hotel. The shows featured musical performances by Joey Cook, Halvsies, Daniel Martin Moore, Public and Young Heirlooms.
At MPMF, we also continued our annual tradition of displaying and selling prints alongside other gig poster artists at the MPMF Poster Expo. After getting inspired while browsing gig posters in the Expo, festival-goers were encouraged to explore the Powerhouse Print Lab box truck, part of SpringBoard and ArtWork’s Box Truck Carnival located in the MidPoint Midway. Inside, individuals could tie on an apron and try their hand printing their own MPMF 2013 poster. You’ll find a selection of photos from the week below or you can see the full gallery here.
Check out our official MPMF show prints for Youth Lagoon, The Head & The Heart and Warpaint. Be sure to like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or check out other Powerhouse Factories’ print shop projects and news at www.phfdesign.com.