Beautiful Angle is a

guerrilla arts Street art is visual art created in public locations for public visibility. It has been associated with the terms "independent art", "post-graffiti", "neo-graffiti" and guerrilla art. Street art has evolved from the early forms of defiant graf ...

poster A poster is a large sheet that is placed either on a public space to promote something or on a wall as decoration. Typically, posters include both typography, textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or w ...

project in Tacoma,

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered on ...

.Beautiful Angle's letterpress art covers Tacoma
by Rosemary Ponnekanti, The News Tribune March 25, 2007 Approximately once per month, graphic designer Lance Kagey and writer Tom Llewellyn create hand-crafted,

letterpress Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing. Using a printing press, the process allows many copies to be produced by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper. A worker comp ...

posters and then distribute them around the city's downtown core via

wheat paste Wheat paste (also known as flour and water paste, flour paste, or simply paste) is a gel or liquid adhesive made from wheat flour or starch and water. It has been used since antiquity for various arts and crafts such as book binding, découpage, ...

and staples."Pair see Tacoma from Beautiful Angle"
''The News Tribune'', August 3, 2003.

History

In the summer of 1999, graphic designer Lance Kagey was introduced to the art of letterpress printing through a visit to a British Columbia studio and through a program at Seattle's

School of Visual Concepts The School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, Washington (state), Washington, is a vocational school training students and working professionals in the fields of user experience, content strategy/design, writing for user experience, graphic design, ...

. Kagey purchased a circa-1950s Challenge proof press This Strange Thing of Ours: Witty and spiritual, scofflaw yet civic-minded. Beautiful Angle is a tangle of contradictions, all coated with wheatpaste
City Arts (Tacoma), Sep/Oct 2007 through

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...

for $50. After paying more than 12 times that amount in shipping and after months of self-education and experimentation, Kagey and

copywriter Copywriting is the act or occupation of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing. The product, called copy or sales copy, is written content that aims to increase brand awareness and ultimately persuade a person or ...

and author Tom Llewellyn began producing posters. The first poster, Swirl, was distributed on October 31, 2002, the anniversary of the posting of ''

The Ninety-Five Theses The ''Ninety-five Theses'' or ''Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences''-The title comes from the 1517 Basel pamphlet printing. The first printings of the ''Theses'' use an incipit rather than a title which summarizes the content ...

'' by

Martin Luther Martin Luther (; ; 10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German priest, theologian, author, hymnwriter, and professor, and Order of Saint Augustine, Augustinian friar. He is the seminal figure of the Reformation, Protestant Refo ...

. Beautiful Angle has used a variety of printing techniques, including split fountain color process, a two-color double run, and a

brayer A brayer is a hand-tool used historically in printing and printmaking to break up and "rub out" (spread) ink, before it was "beaten" using inking balls or composition rollers. The word is derived from the verb to "bray", meaning "to break, pound ...

over a printed image. A typical press run is 100 posters, of which 80 are posted around the downtown area of Tacoma, and the remainder are sold. Beautiful Angle has a "strange, contradictory relationship with the city"; even though the posters are posted perhaps illegally, the group has won a

Chamber of Commerce A chamber of commerce, or board of trade, is a form of business network. For example, a local organization of businesses whose goal is to further the interests of businesses. Business owners in towns and cities form these local societies to ad ...

award of merit. Beautiful Angle has also worked with other artists such as

Art Chantry Arthur Samuel Wilbur Chantry II (born April 9, 1954) is a graphic designer often associated with the posters and album covers he has done for bands from the Pacific Northwest, such as Mudhoney, Mono Men, Soundgarden, and The Sonics. Biography C ...

. Beautiful Angle has been featured in Felt and Wire, a leading graphic design blog. It has been the subject of a ''City Arts Magazine'' cover story, as well as feature stories in the leading Tacoma newspaper, ''

The News Tribune ''The News Tribune'' is an American daily newspaper based in Tacoma, Washington. It is the second-largest daily newspaper in the state of Washington with a weekday circulation of 30,945 in 2020. With origins dating back to 1883, the newspaper w ...

'', and in the ''

Weekly Volcano ''Weekly Volcano'' was a weekly entertainment newspaper in based in Tacoma, Washington, United States. It served the southern Puget Sound region and reports on film, theater, food, art and music Music is generally defined as the art o ...

'', ''

Toby Room ''Toby Room'' is a quarterly arts publication founded in 2001 and a project of ArtRod. Organized as a gallery in print, ''Toby Room'' featured writings, projects, and interviews amongst artists, filmmakers, and musicians, alongside contributions ...

'', and many local and arts-related blogs. The City of Tacoma's outreach website, cityofdestiny.com, now links to the project. Gallery shows have been held at Handforth Gallery,

, Jazzbones, Pike Street Press, Fulcrum Gallery and Blackwater Cafe. A nearly complete collection of posters is always on display at King's Books in Tacoma. In 2006, the

Washington State Historical Society The Washington State Historical Society is the historical society of the U.S. state of Washington. Based in Tacoma, it is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and is a trustee agency of the state. It was founded in 1891. The board of trustees of the society incl ...

awarded a grant to Beautiful Angle for a series of posters for their "History in the Making" exhibit. In 2008, the Washington State Historical Society commissioned Beautiful Angle to make a series of posters to promote their exhibit ''Tacoma's Civil Rights Struggle''. In August 2009, a Beautiful Angle retrospective was included in the annual TypeCon exhibition, under the direction of the

Society of Typographic Aficionados A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societi ...

, shown in

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

, Washington, and

Brighton Brighton () is a seaside resort and one of the two main areas of the City of Brighton and Hove in the county of East Sussex, England. It is located south of London. Archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dates back to the Bronze A ...

, England. In November 2009, the City of Tacoma Arts Commission awarded Beautiful Angle their Amocat Award. In 2011, Beautiful Angle received a City of Tacoma arts grant to produce ''The Tacoma Folio'', a limited-edition 30-page book of posters, each around the theme of Tacoma's own mythology. In 2014, Beautiful Angle received a second City of Tacoma arts grant to produce a limited-edition poster for "Art at Work Month". In 2014, Beautiful Angle was featured in a print arts show ''Ink This'', at the Tacoma Art Museum.

External links

Feature in Felt & WireBeautiful Angle official siteCover Story on Beautiful Angle in the Weekly VolcanoTacoma Arts Commission Amocat AwardTacoma's official city site, linking to Beautiful AngleEntry about Beautiful Angle on Exit133.com, a Tacoma blog

References

{{Reflist Culture jamming Graffiti and unauthorised signage Public art in the United States