Amy Jo Hendrickson, part of the Burlesque Design team of artists, creates screenprints and rock posters that marry a retro sensibility and campy sense of fun with a unabashedly Midwestern flair.
AMY JO’S HANDIWORK IS A MÉLANGE OF BURLESQUE CAMP, cowgirl grit, and Victorian flourish. She’s undeniably influenced by ’70s pop design, but this North Dakota girl brings to those psychedelic swirls the frontier spirit of a nineteenth-century Sears Roebuck catalog. For real. When I ask her about it, she cracks up, “Those are actual images from some late 1800s Sears Roebuck catalog I picked up.” But make no mistake. Amy Jo’s work has some bite: Hendrickson’s all-American blonde pigtails read Rollergirl more than Little House on the Prairie.
If you go to rock shows around Minnesota, you’ve seen (and likely admired) Amy Jo’s posters slapped up on the walls around you. She’s been at it for years. “I grew up in Fargo, and I got into making posters kind of indirectly,” Hendrickson recalls. “When I was about twenty, I started booking musical acts in town, and I just made rock posters and fliers as a promotional tool. It wasn’t until later, when I went to college, that I started thinking of graphic design and screenprinting as something I’d try to do more seriously.”
Once she moved to Minneapolis and set up shop at First Amendment Gallery with some other artists, her graphic design business really took off. Now, she’s doing individual commissions like wedding invites and baby announcements. “A guy hired me to do a portrait of his kids, like they were in a rock poster,” she laughs. “And I guess a lot of people just want to do something a little different for their wedding invitations. They want them to be a little cooler than the usual thing. It’s crazy, but sort of fun.”
And for those in the Twin Cities music scene, Amy Jo’s sly grrl power designs have been garnering more and more notice. She might have had to hustle business before, but now, her work is in such demand that she finds herself turning offers down. “I get swamped sometimes and need a little break,” she explains. “It’s pretty time consuming to create a poster—for me it’s such a personal process. My ideas come from how I feel when I listen to the music. All told it takes several days, just to design and print the posters. I want to keep my prices affordable, so I’m really pretty much just doing work for bands I love.”
Amy Jo’s design savvy has the hook of a catchy pop song. She unabashedly draws
from
all
sorts of things to get
ideas—‘early
twentieth-century burlesque imagery, retro catalog clip art,
vintage
books and
movie
posters,
’80s
album covers. And then she tweaks those familiar styles with unexpected
juxtaposititons and cheeky flair.
Even if she didn’t set out to do it, looking back, she says it makes sense that she was drawn to this kind of work. “When I was a kid, I loved flipping through the images in catalogs. I always noticed album covers and ad designs and movie posters,” she remembers. “Now, when I’m not sure whether I’ve got any poster ideas left, I just head out to the library and start looking through old books. There’s all kinds of inspiration out there if you know how to look.”
About the artist:
Amy Jo Hendrickson
describes herself as a North Dakota girl who grew up believing
it reasonable to become either a ballerina or a cowgirl. But, because "horses
are kind of scary and I can't balance on one foot very well" she went to
college and got a "fancy schmancy" degree in graphic design. From her home
base at Minneapolis’s First
Amendment Gallery, Amy Jo designs and screenprints rock posters and album
covers for bands all over the country. She occasionally takes on custom
screenprint and design commissions and, when she can, she turns her hand to
fine art pieces as well. You can see a
bunch of her work on her website
or mnartists.org.
All you social networking mavens can find
her on MySpace, too.
CLICK HERE to browse through an extensive collection of this much-in-demand artist's work.
