'America Letterpress: The Art of the Hatch Show Print'

'American Letterpress: The Art of Hatch Show Print'

Austin Museum of Art – Downtown,

823 Congress, 495-9224, www.amoa.org

Through May 9

You know that man with the guitar: That's Johnny Cash. That's an image of Johnny Cash, at least, and a Cash much younger than you recall him from the video cover he did of Trent Reznor's "Hurt," with all his Man in Black history providing a more storied foundation to the song's emotional pain. That's an image of Johnny Cash on a poster that, unless you're less than two rest stops away from Geezerville, was printed before you were born. That's a Hatch Show Print, ladies and gentlemen, and if you step right up, you're going to see an entire show – a panoply! a spectacle! – of such paper-based wonders right here in the river city.

The Nashville letterpress company Hatch Show Print, established in 1879, started out by producing hand-printed broadsides for traveling shows, minstrel shows, state fairs and circus acts, concerts by music stars newly anointed by that radio thing Guglielmo Marconi had visited upon the world. Hand-printed, these posters, from images and type that were carved backward into huge blocks and sheets of wood. They were redolent of the vivid minimalism of shape and color such a medium, under the pressure of promotional deadlines, required. Besides, such stark and simple images made for more effective communication when these broadsides were featured (as they frequently were, back in the day) on the broad side of literal barns, there to raise a visual halloo: Behold, all you workers returning home after a hard day of toiling in the fields, there's an event happening nearby this evening that'll ease away your cares and woes!

But that was long ago and far away, in the days when the Grand Old Opry was about as new as the closest Panda Express is today. That was in olden times, when names like Roy Acuff and Tex Ritter and Bill Monroe were the freshness of the moment. These days, things are different. But these days, Hatch Show Print is still very much alive and printing, and it's still doing it the old-fashioned way, even when incorporating machine-generated photo images. Most of the limited-edition promotional prints are smaller – not many field hands out there still needing barn-based advertising – but they're no less effective, and some are still carved into wood and embellished with print from blocks of type older than your grandfather. Now they advertise Wilco and R.E.M. and Emmylou Harris and the Shins and, yes, even Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails. Now they've got a wealth of historical vernacular to draw from, and new, college-edumacated designers have gone all passionately postmodern with that vernacular. Now the Hatch Show Prints aren't more awesome than they were at the beginning – they're just a different kind of awesome, a different phase of awesome. And the whole range of this awesomeness, room after room of graphics to grab the eye and jolt the music-loving heart, from more than a century of stunning work, is currently the main exhibition at the Austin Museum of Art.

If there were such things as ghosts, we reckon you'd know whose ghost would be haunting – not mournfully, but happily, even proudly – this show. It'd be Mr. Cash, that Man in Black, and he'd be waiting for his otherworldly friends, all those legends, to join him in this nearly sacred place where their images, their histories, and in no small way the history of this country are currently stored. You see his shade, friend, please do tell him – or Frank Zappa or Bessie Smith or Hank Williams or Kitty Wells – that we said howdy, y'hear?