Yee-Haw Industries
Kevin Bradley, Bryan Baker, & Adam Ewing
Bio
Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress & Design Company
For the past 10 years, Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress & Design Company has promoted artists of all kinds. Using old proofing presses to print from wood and metal type as well as hand carved blocks, the shop continues to produce poster work as well as high-end fine art editions. Along with one of the most extensive working collections of letterpress type in the country, Yee-Haw's downtown Knoxville studio houses one of the United States' largest flatbed etching presses, allowing the artists to produce prints measuring up to 10x4 feet in size. The past few years have found Yee-Haw creating commemorative merchandise and print editions for the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. The shop was recently given a solo exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art.
Kevin Bradley, Bryan Baker, Adam Ewing, along with their associate Julie Belcher, have worked as a team developing new techniques and designs based on using hand-pulled letterpress materials for posters. Yee-Haw Industries was established in 1997 in Corbin, Kentucky by Bradley and Belcher, whose associates have joined in their exploration of contemporary applications of hand-produced techniques and images made from antique wood and metal type and hand-carved woodblocks. It is not a technique readily associated with contemporary art and museum exhibits, but this exhibit shows that in their hands they succeeded in doing that-using design, fine paper, and hand-pulled printing in a contemporary style of their own.
Show Information
Limited-Edition
Museum Art Posters
The hand-pulled letterpress posters by Kevin Bradley. Bryan Baker and Adam Ewing are part of a Tennessee story played out in Washington, D.C. Kevin Bradley, founder of Yee-Haw Industries in Knoxville, learned the technique of hand-pulled letterpress printing at the University of Tennessee, and after a brief period at Hatch Show Print in Nashville, settled finally on Knoxville as the place to develop his own artwork and printing style for a variety of clients. He and his colleagues at Yee-Haw Industries were commissioned in 2005 and 2006 to design posters for two major art exhibits- The Societe Anonyme at the Phillips Gallery and Dada at the National Gallery of Art--both major art museums in Washington, D. C. This exhibit is about those commissions. Additional art posters from The Arts Company archives will be included in this exhibit of special art posters.
Dada Fine Art Print
This print was designed for the National Gallery of Art's Dada Exhibition in early 2006. Dada was an influential international avant garde art movement in the 1920s and 30s. Dada was born in New York and Zurich and spread to Paris, Cologne, Hannover and Berlin and included artists Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Francis Picabia and Kurt Schwitters plus many others.
Typeset, inked, and pulled by hand. Letterpress printed in red and black inks on white acid free paper. All edges are deckled so the size is approximate. This print was chosen by Print's Regional Design Annual 2006 for excellence in design.
Societe Anonyme
In 2006, Yee-Haw created limited edition prints exclusively for the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. These hand-pulled letterpress/woodblock prints commemorate the The Societe Anonyme:Modernism for America Exhibition that was organized by the Yale University Art Gallery.
These three prints are hand-pulled letterpress from hand set antique typography and hand carved wood blocks. Inks are impressed into archival acid-free 100% cotton paper with a deckled edge.
