Magic News: Jack White poster artists to converge at Third Man for Holiday Bazaar

 Matthew Jacobson didn't design his first concert poster until he was 40 years old.

But the West Bloomfield Township native has since become one of Jack White's go-to designers for show posters, and he will be on hand Saturday and Sunday at Third Man Records' Detroit location for Third Man Records' Holiday Poster Bazaar.

He'll appear with two other Third Man poster artists, Chris Everhart and Eric Von Munz, to meet with fans, chat about their designs and to sell rare and collectible works from their archives.

Jacobson, who has designed posters for Jack White and White's band the Raconteurs, is used to being behind the scenes, not up front. "So it's nice to meet with people," he says, "because as concert poster designers, we don't really have many outlets to talk about our work."

Jacobson, 54, says he likes to incorporate unique geographic and artist-specific details into his posters; the more precise the reference or bigger the challenge, the better.

For White's concert at Little Caesars Arena in 2018, Jacobson paid homage to the Stone Burlesk, a burlesque theater in Detroit that Jacobson's grandfather used to run, which sat on the site of what is now LCA.

For a pair of White's shows at Detroit's Masonic Temple in 2022 — including the concert where White proposed to his girlfriend, Olivia Jean, and then Married her on stage — Jacobson Painstakingly chronicled the day's events on a local, national and international level and incorporated them into the design of the posters, and then raced against time to get them printed up and over to the venue.

Those posters sold out, but Jacobson says he'll have a couple on hand for sale this weekend. He'll also have a few copies of his personal favorite show poster, the one he designed for White's show in Las Vegas in 2022, which Jacobson opened, performing as a magician. The back of the poster for that night's concert included instructions on how to perform a magic trick for friends.

Jacobson is planning to perform that trick at the Third Man shindig, and he and the other artists will have an opportunity to talk about their designs from 1-2 p.m. Saturday. On Sunday, there will be a panel discussion with the three artists, hosted by Liz Warner, from 1-2 p.m. The event is free both days.

Jacobson, who now lives in Chicago, formerly worked in-house as Third Man's head of design and has also designed posters for Wilco, the Cure and the Smashing Pumpkins. He says he doesn't have a personal style or a trademark for his poster work.

"It's really important to me, as a designer, that the poster and the work reflects the musician, not me," he says. "That it looks like they sound, or it feels like they make people feel, not that you look at it and you're like, 'Oh, that's a Matthew Jacobson poster.' I would argue that my posters don't have a particular style. My style, hopefully, is not having a style."

Von Munz has been in the poster game since the early '90s, initially designing flyers and posting them around his hometown of Milwaukee to hype up shows from the artists he loved. He was a one-man promotion machine: His reasoning was that if more people knew about the shows, attendance would increase, and then the artists, in turn, would return to Milwaukee on their next tours, his art in service of the greater civic good.

In 1999, Von Munz silkscreened a series of thrift store LPs to promote a White Stripes show at Milwaukee's Cactus Club, hammering them into telephone poles and flooding local record stores with them. Those LPs are now pieces of White Stripes lore, and originals sell for hundreds of dollars.

"They were just a two-piece from Detroit! They weren't going to be the next Beatles," says Von Munz. "I wish I would have known then what I know now!"

Von Munz, 54, will have some reprints of the record at the Bazaar, and he says Third Man collectors have always been a voracious bunch.

"Jack White fans are Rabid." he says. "They Love the man."

Article from: Detroitnews.com