In The Good Name of the Company at 6020 Wilshire Blvd in February 2013

ForYourArt presented an exhibition of works produced by or with the Colby Poster Printing Company, curated by Jan Tumlir, with Christopher Michlig and Brian Roettinger.

In the Good Name of the Company presented works by Kathryn Andrews, Scott Benzel, Peter Coffin, Sam Durant, Eve Fowler, Emilie Halpern, Imprenta, Simon Johnston, Christopher Michlig, Brian Roettinger, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, and many more alongside a representative selection of posters from Colby’s own archive.

Typically employed to promote neighborhood events such as street fairs, small-scale musical concerts and the like, they would find a new clientele when Ed Ruscha contracted a rival company in 1962 to produce the announcement for the exhibition New Paintings of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum. Since then, the Colby Poster Printing Company has gone on to serve as an important resource to a broad range of LA-based artists, from Allen Ruppersberg (who transcribed Allen Ginsberg’s Howl onto Colby posters in 2003) to Eve Fowler (who did much the same with Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons in 2012).

Colby has provided artists with a means to escape the confines of the studio or the white cube. Instead, through the poster medium, artists could engage the life of the street. As such, their posters became a form of public art perfectly suited to the LA context with its inherent transience and disposability. In one way or another, the artists featured in this exhibition have used the poster as a means to shape our experience of the street and the city.

The exhibition closed with Black Light Night, where the exhibition was lit only by black lights and featured a listening party for Scott Benzel’s accompanying sound piece, String Quartet No. 2., a four-channel sound installation. The quartet is based on field recordings of street sounds found around Los Angeles–the sounds of car alarms, helicopters, the Metro Rail, pedestrian crossings, and traffic–and structured loosely after Morton Feldman's String Quartet Number 2. It debuted at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2011. In the Good Name of the Company was its Los Angeles debut.

In conjunction with the 2013 Printed Matter New York Art Book Fair,ARTBOOK | D.A.P., PictureBox and ForYourArt hosted the opening of In the Good Name of the Company: Artworks and ephemera produced by or in tandem with the Colby Printing Company at See.Me Gallery to launch the accompanying book in February 2013.

Read Jan Tumlir’s essay from the book “Concrete Poetry” to find out more about the Colby Poster Printing Company.

Read Remembering Colby Poster Printing Company on Los Angeles I’m Yours, KCET’s article Colby Printing: Rainbow Posters on Every Corner, and LA Currents article Armchair Critic: More Than Words in LA.

See more photos of selected posters here.