Sweet Pea Festival Poster Submission

Every summer in August, there’s an arts festival in Bozeman, Montana. It began in 1906 and continued through 1916, after which it disappeared. Sixty years later the event was reborn and an open poster competition was added to inject energy into the festival and engage the arts community. In 1982, the open poster competition was adopted as a class project for a graphic design course I was enrolled in.

Fast forward to 2014 while sifting through archives in my studio, I came across an old portfolio. I discovered a few scraps of my poster project from my 1982 studio class—a clear acetate camera-ready overlay with various rubylith shapes and white Plaka paint splatters, a piece of illustration board painted with a black texture and a large halftone dot floral image.

After discovering these, I was inspired to design another poster for the Sweet Pea Festival poster competition. So, thirty-four years later I started to research the complete history of the event. Besides my nostalgia for the project, my entry was an homage to Bozeman, and reflected a renewed interest in visual storytelling which began during undergraduate school, and became more deliberate in graduate school. I loved the nostalgia of participating in the competition so many years later too. I didn’t win.