Some never considered themselves designers, simply making Xerox posters out of necessity to promote their bands. Some are artists and illustrators synonymous with various music genres and some are career graphic designers. Thunderbitch is the first attempt to document these women artists and their work. Taking its name from a pseudonym for Catherine Weinstein, an early rock poster maker in Portland, this exhibit spans the emergence of psychedelic rock, DIY punk and new wave, grunge, riot grrl and today’s contemporary silkscreen gig poster movement from Washington and Oregon.

Women were likely involved in design for Northwest rock as long as the music has existed, but their presence was undocumented. Throughout the ‘50s and much of the ‘60s designers, men or women, were not always cited for their work. Often record cover and poster work was anonymous and produced by trade printers, a profession that was and still is male-dominated. One woman Jini Dellaccio—a photographer not a designer—had a profound influence on the Northwest rock aesthetic in the early ‘60s through her images of bands like the Sonics, the Wailers and many more. It was only around the time of the psychedelic movement that work clearly attributed to women designers appeared.

Gina Papen was a transplant who moved north in October 1966 when San Francisco, her “hippy haven,” was “over-run with too many people.” She followed friends, members of the Ph Phactor Jug Band, who relocated to Oregon. Artistically inclined, she was a natural to take part in the active poster and handbill making scene in Portland. She worked with partners Paul Bassett and Tom Goodwin to promote and host dances around town. Her output was small but influential, collaborating with Paul on only three or four posters under the name “Air Sign Co” until Spring of 1968 when she moved to New York to attend the Parsons School of Design. She currently lives in Berkeley, California. Papen was an original in the region, bringing both a psychedelic aesthetic as well as a do-it-yourself model of design/promotion/event production that foreshadowed women’s involvement in the Northwest scene to come, but it’s the life and work of her peer Weinstein that most strongly reverberates to today.

Born to Marion and Daniel Martin on February 24, 1943 in Indianapolis, Indiana, her parents divorced when Catherine was quite young. Weinstein’s mother later married a semi-pro baseball player named Shelly McConnnell who played for both the Cincinnati Reds and the New York Yankees and became a career Air Force pilot, serving in three wars. Shelly McConnell adopted Catherine in 1954. As with many military families, the McConnells moved often, and Catherine attended school in places as varied as Murfreesboro, Tennesse and Saint-Cloud, France, where she graduated from high school. She attended Willamette University briefly for art before transferring to the University of Oregon to study engineering, but dropped out before obtaining a degree due to financial pressures (she would have been the first woman to graduate from their School of Engineering). In 1965, she married Michael Weinstein, and they had a daughter the same year. Shortly afterwards, Catherine decided she wanted a divorce and insisted on giving their daughter up for adoption. This decision further deepened a rift between Catherine and her family which had been growing for years.

As a child, Catherine was independent minded, always going against the grain (her cousin Nancy Pickett points to a family photo as typical—Catherine defiantly disobeyed the photographer’s instructions to the children to close their eyes). Dramatic changes and events characterized much of her adult life and Catherine’s rebellious spirit found expression in the mid-‘60s with her fondness for fast cars. She owned a red MGA convertible from the late ‘50s or early ‘60s and, despite (or perhaps because of) the rarity of women in the sport, raced in Portland area road rallies. Catherine was part of the Cascade Sports Car Club in Portland and reportedly initiated an event of her own, the “Weinstein-Sleep Sports Car Rally.” Her interest in graphic design grew from the need to promote various races and rallies and she created numerous posters and car club logos. The expressive, hand-drawn typography in her “Mountains to the Sea” rally poster from April, 1967 reflects the psychedelic style she was evolving for her other passion, music.

In the late ‘60s Catherine got involved in the music scene in Portland, working on concert light shows and creating her first music poster for the Pythian Ballroom event called “Let’s Get Together”. Mostly self-taught as an illustrator and designer, she developed her own take on the psychedelic style of the day. She created a number of posters and handbills for local and national rock bands, from The Portland Zoo to Led Zepplin, as well as work for blues shows, poetry readings and local music shops. Many works are signed Catherine E Weinstein, but starting about 1971 she also used two pseudonyms, Hedda Goldspace and Thunderbitch, the latter resonating as a pure expression of her personality to those who knew her.

"Cathy had a mysterious, Cheshire Cat kind of look about her and a wry little smile that let you know she had more going on upstairs than she was letting on. She would sit in her armchair with her legs drawn up under her and kind of preside over whatever was happening, like some kind of a high priestess. I think she was hiding a great insecurity, but she was able to overcome it. She was not intimidated easily. Or she didn’t show it."

She made her own path in the world, maneuvering through fields that were absolutely male-dominated, from racing cars, to working as a senior draftsman for Tektronix and a tool-and-die engineer for Freightliner, to volunteering with Portland’s police. What drove her is impossible to say, but having been adopted into the McConnell family, she undoubtedly felt herself an outsider. Reportedly her grandmother branded her as “not a McConnell” early in life based on behavior described as “precocious” and “unruly”. Catherine’s sense of identity must have been strained throughout her life. In 1979 she turned her back on a liberal, basically hippy lifestyle and become a political conservative. Marking this change while at Portland’s Earth Tavern, she said “All the people I used to know in Portland are either here, dead or in prison.” the latter a fate she would narrowly avoid just a few years later.

The most disturbing event in Catherine’s life came in 1983. A neighbor threw a party to celebrate the birth of his daughter that went late into the evening. Irritated by the noise, Catherine phoned the neighbor’s landlord to complain, as well as the police who came twice that evening as a result. But the party never truly broke up and, despite moving it indoors, Catherine’s irritation with her neighbor only grew until she decided to act. “I feel what I did was right, I had to have some relief,” she later told police. At about 3:15 am on July 15th she shot Michael Carroll three times, once each in the abdomen, shoulder and arm after threatening him from her window with a .38 caliber, Smith & Wesson, stainless steel handgun. Catherine, at that point unemployed for two years, had volunteered thousands of hours with the Portland Police, starting in 1979. She was a trained gun owner, even receiving a “Most Improved” trophy for shooting accuracy from the Portland Police Association in 1980. According to the Deputy District Attorney prosecuting the case, the bullet entering Carroll’s abdomen had “missed killing him by inches,” but Catherine’s mother claims she “...could have killed the man if she wanted to, [she] was just trying to ‘scare’ him...” After being advised of her rights by arresting officers G. L. Barbour and D. E. Bruce, Catherine refused to give her name or make a statement, “I’ll tell it to the dicks” she said, meaning detectives. Catherine spent five days in jail before phoning her estranged parents who bailed her out and supported her throughout the trial. The following November she was found guilty of attempted first degree manslaughter by Judge John J. Murchison in Multnomah County Circuit Court, an offense that could have sent her to jail for 10 years. Her defense lawyer, Craig P. Colby had argued that Catherine was not guilty by reason of temporary insanity—that she had lapsed into a “transient psychotic state.” A court ordered psychological profile of Catherine describes her as having “lived in continuous isolation...rejects sexual relationships as involving games, few friends, although many acquaintances.” She is also described as pervasively suspicious and mistrusting, hypersensitive, unable to relax, illustrated by a few anecdotes leading up to the shooting, including “flashing gun at whores” and “breaking glass in face of [a] bar molester.” Despite the profile, her temporary insanity defense and conviction, she was considered “not a danger to society in general,” and sentenced on January 4, 1984 to five years of close probation.

Towards the end of her life, she lived with her companion, Blackwell Arendale, a conservative figure in Portland, renting a room in his house. Long unemployed, she supported herself by buying second hand items, mostly antiques, and repairing them in order to resell. She befriended a poster collector, David Faggioli, who currently owns the largest archive of her material. Catherine was diagnosed with lung cancer, entered the Hopewell House Hospice, and died on her 60th birthday, February 24, 2003. Catherine’s daughter given up for adoption, Lisa Weinstein (aka Lisa Meyer-Alborn), knew nothing of her mother’s life, but worked from the late ‘80s to the early ‘90s booking bands and promoting concerts at various venues in Portland, including The Wipers, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Rev. Horton Heat, The Posies, Afghan Whigs, The Fluid and more. Lisa Weinstein first came into contact with her mother's biological family and saw a photo of her as a result of the curator’s research for this exhibit.

There’s a dark side to Northwest rock that particularly coincides with the emergence of punk. The raw rebelliousness of the ‘60s and ‘70s is the precursor to the movement. Weinstein fits with that strain. She is to rock poster design what the Sonics (the ‘60s Tacoma band, not our erstwhile ex-basketball team) are to music. Her story, generally known only to a handful of baby-boomer poster enthusiasts (no retrospective exhibits, and no real biography existed until now) should be added to the proto-punk pantheon. Catherine followed her passions and in the process became an inventive, self-styled designer and illustrator. Inserting herself into careers and interests that were difficult to impossible for women to enter, Catherine rebelled against the constraints of established feminine roles and reality, becoming a pioneer spirit in Northwest rock. The fact that she made posters promoting her own events link her directly to later DIY movements and individuals, from punk to riot grrl.

Greater accessibility to cheaper production methods (Xerox) led to the foundation of a broader, more inclusive Northwest DIY design culture producing primarily black and white posters and zines. Some of the earliest poster work was executed at the dawn of Northwest punk by women who were in bands or part of the scene, including Eva Lake of the Kinetics , Barbara Ireland of the Fags (who started making posters when she was 16), Sheli Story, who was the doorman at Seattle’s famed punk venue The Bird, and Cielito Pascual, who in 1983 helped open the Metropolis, Seattle’s crucial all-ages venue, and created its first poster. Raw and gritty, these posters were collaged together with scraps of found imagery and type (Cielito recalls lifting the electrical diagrams from her dad’s engineering books). Generally these women didn’t consider themselves designers, they operated out of necessity, creating posters and flyers to promote their events.

In this period fanzines, or zines—cheap, black and white, Xeroxed magazines—became an increasingly popular method of spreading the word about your music or politics. Bon Von Wheelie’s long-running “Wig Out!” has been promoting her band Girl Trouble and the local music scene since 1984. On the illustration front, the 2nd issue of Bruce Pavitt’s “Subterranean Pop” (the precursor to SubPop records) from 1980 features a cover illustration by Lynda Barry. Daina Darzin’s “Desperate Times” from 1981 has been credited with publishing the first description of Seattle alternative music as “grunge” in a piece by Mark Arm. Reaching back deeper into radical, Northwest feminist history, this exhibit includes “Lilith”, a hand-assembled magazine published in the Fall of 1968 by Seattle’s Judith Bissell, Dotty DeCoster and Louise Crowley. Judith and her husband were members of the Weather Underground who attempted to bomb the University of Washington’s ROTC building in 1970. They went into hiding, she was eventually arrested and sent to prison in connection with a plot to bomb the office of California State Senator John Briggs in 1977. While not directly music-related, this self-published piece predicts the emergence of later Northwest zines. With a mix of art, comics and politics, “Lilith” is a precursor to early ‘90s riot grrl zines such as “Girl Germs” and “Bikini Kill”, complete with calls for feminist action and solidarity.

Punk glorified anti-commercialism with anti-design and universally available, lowest common denominator production methods. Rejecting conservative societal norms, equality between men and women in this moment was not an issue. You were either punk, or not. Male/female distinctions were waning—androgyny had arrived via uni-sex hair, fashion. In this scenario, design was merely a hands-on function of the scene that anyone could produce.

In the early to mid ‘80s, especially in Seattle, something was in the air. A number of local groups—best described as bar bands—were on the edge on something bigger. A variety of small, independent labels sprang up, putting out product mindful of marketing, brand, image. In this period, women were just as likely as men to be the professional designers shaping the public face of these bands. Examples include Helena Rogers working with Red Dress, Helene Silverman with Mondo Vita, Katha Dalton with The Slamhound Hunter, Heidi Snellman and Kim Stringfellow with The Cowboys. Dynamic album covers like “Fins de Paris” and “The Cowboys” are clearly based in the punk, collage aesthetic, but with rough edges cleaned-up and a target market in mind. Helena Rogers, signing herself as “Plastic Horse Graphics,” led the charge early in the decade with silkscreen posters to promote her band Student Nurse from 1980-1982. Generally printed in runs of 200, she distributed them on phone poles around Seattle. Her colorful posters were a breath of fresh air next to the standard Xeroxes of the day, but their cool factor was their undoing as a promotional tool, they were stolen nearly as quickly as they went up. Stat cameras and cut ruby lith ruled the day in terms of assembly for these designers, but a change in graphic production was on the horizon. The end of this period is marked by two simultaneous revolutions, the arrival of the desktop PC and the rapid ascent of Sub Pop from small, independent record label to world-wide, punk-gone-mainsteam phenomenon.

Sub Pop’s dramatic growth in the early ‘90s began in Olympia in 1980 with Bruce Pavitt’s “Subterranean Pop” fanzine—essentially a one man operation, but women like Lynda Barry were involved from the start. Barry, an illustrator and alternative comic artist who attended Evergreen State College in Olympia with Pavitt, designed the cover to Subterranean Pop #2, an extremely rare artifact of Northwest rock (seen in original seal-a-meal plastic package for mailing, pg 34). Profiling independent bands from around the country, Pavitt’s intention was never to be limited to the Northwest. While breaking bands that became internationally known—like Sound Garden, Nirvana, Pearl Jam—Sub Pop, the record label, also developed a graphic design “house style” that unified much of its output. Pavitt and Art Chantry established that style, but designers like Jane Higgens and Lisa Orth were responsible for some of the most iconic album covers of this era. For the sake of brevity, this exhibit features only a few key samples from their portfolios, in particular Orth’s design for Nirvana’s first album “Bleach” (her typographic treatment of the band's name—a stretched Bodoni—became Nirvana’s default logo) and Higgins’ cover for the Dwarves’ “Blood, Guts and Pussy”.

“Bleach,” a relatively obscure release by a band known only locally in 1989, eventually went platinum after the unexpected success of “Nevermind.” The design is classic Sub Pop, a stripped down black and white layout that directly connects with male, head banging, alterna-rock energy. The Dwarves, an established underground band before signing, had as their first Sub Pop release “Blood, Guts and Pussy” in 1990. Voted the “most offensive album ever made” by SPIN magazine, the infamous cover photograph by Keith Levine has been called “equally disgusting” as the album’s title. Higgins says although she wasn’t offended by the album art at the time, she hasn’t shown it to her children. To her, the cover design was work for a client and an accurate representation of the Dwarves and their music. Additionally she believes “It’s not the nudity that’s offensive, it’s the blood.” Both designs are raw in their own way and play on what could only be called a “male rock gaze”—all the more interesting that they were designed by women. At the same time as Sub Pop was exploding, a revolution in feminist rock and politics was brewing directly South in Olympia.

The riot grrl movement, merging feminist ideals with punk, traces its origins to Olympia, Washington in the early ‘90s. Kathleen Hannah’s fanzine “Bikini Kill” was one of several self-produced tracts promoting female empowerment that sprang up at the time. The fanzine project developed into the band Bikini Kill, a seminal group at the forefront of the movement. Well documented elsewhere, riot grrl, as with punk, encouraged a do-it-yourself attitude towards design. Posters, albums, magazines reflect a punk collage and typewriter aesthetic. Bikini Kill’s single “Rebel Girl” typifies the attitude—art and messages come straight from the band with no professional design intermediaries. Riot grrl gained steam and became known internationally, second only to grunge in terms of putting a Northwest music scene on the map in the ‘90s.

Associated movements like Queercore united punk, politics and queer pride on the stage via Northwest groups like Team Dresch. The Center on Contemporary Art’s 1996 combined art/rock event, “Gender Fucked”, for all its provocative bluster, is downright cute when illustrated by Seattle’s talented Ellen Forney. Not limited to gay artists, the ripple effect has extended to mainstream acceptance of gender play as portrayed in pop culture from “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (the original play had its first run outside New York City at Seattle’s Re-Bar) to Seattle’s all-girl AC/DC cover band, Hell’s Belles, founded in 2000 and now a Northwest rock institution.

One woman stridently demonstrating societal change since the late ‘60s is Kim Kalliber (Nepotism alert, Kim Kalliber is the curator’s sister), graphic designer and founding member of the Piston Packin’ Mamas, an all-girl, Seattle, vintage car and motorcycle club started in 2004. Absent the restrictions that existed in Weinstein and Papen’s time, the Piston Packin’ Mama’s have turned gender expectations on their head by not simply breaking into established male territory but claiming it as their own. Kalliber, as designer for the Mamas, constantly plays with sex, gender, fast cars and rock ‘n’ roll, from physical objects such as a strap-on, hand-painted, piston holster to pin-up rally flyers. Like Weinstein, Kalliber began designing primarily to promote car club events and branched out to designing rock posters and flyers. Whether it demonstrates the ultimate acceptance for outsider women—unthinkable in Weinstein’s era—or pure exploitation is debatable, but Kalliber and the Mamas were recently offered their own reality TV show by an agent for the Discovery Channel. They turned down this proposal, the highest calling the average Jane or Joe American can hope for, fearing their interactions would be manipulated or scripted (being real is real boring in reality television).

So, are we finally equal? The last decade, from the late ‘90s to 2010, brought a steady increase in rock poster popularity as an art form and its simultaneous commodification. The founding of gigposters.com in 2001 and the American Poster Institute’s Flatstock in 2002 provided new outlets and promotional opportunities for poster artists and their products. In this environment, the goal of poster making shifted largely from promoting shows to promoting the poster artist who creates high-end posters (silkscreen being the medium of choice) in order to sell prints, rather than necessarily being paid for the design by a band or venue. These posters will not be found stapled to telephone poles, the printing is too expensive for mass distribution and the end result simply too valuable as an object. In theory, new economic opportunities afforded by Flatstock events are of equal access to both men and women, but something funny happened along the way, and women designers selling at these events are far outnumbered by men. The effect is that the current Northwest rock poster scene is viewed by many as a “boys club.” This despite the fact that the majority of professional designers in the region are female (the Seattle chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Artists, AIGA, reports membership upwards of 60% female), and despite the increasing gender equality among designers in Northwest rock specifically, starting in the ‘70s and building over subsequent decades. This perception is reinforced, intentionally or not, by events such as Experience Music Project’s oral history panel discussion in 2009 “Perspectives in Poster Design,” which “focused on the evolution of poster design in the Northwest.” It featured six “prominent local graphic designers” in rock, all men. In essence, stage presence alone edited women out of the history of poster development in Northwest rock.

From the tortured, inner demons of Catherine Weinstein, played out in her illustrative posters and gender-defiant life in the ‘60s and ‘70s, to the gender-busting actions of Kim Kalliber and the Piston Packin’ Mamas today. From the militant desire for revolutionary, societal change proclaimed by Bissell, Crowley and DeCoster in their DIY zine precursor “Lilith” in 1968, to the third wave feminist zines of Kathleen Hannah and Bikini Kill in the early ‘90s. These women gave physical manifestations to thoughts, feelings and societal movements via ink and paper, all the while promoting one of our region’s greatest assets, rock and roll. The only question now is can we write a history of design that includes them all?

Daniel R. Smith
Seattle, June, 2010