Mike King Is Your Favorite Band's Favorite Concert Poster Artist

Poster House will celebrate his work for David Byrne, Charli XCX, Arcade Fire and other acts

Mike King is the most prolific gig poster artist in America, according to New York City’s Poster House.

The artist has designed more than 5,000 posters for the likes of David Byrne, The Cramps, Arcade Fire, Guided by Voices, Broken Social Scene, Stereolab, Devo, Coldplay and a ton of other musical acts since the late 1970s.

Basically, everyone.

More than 1,000 of King’s posters have been compiled in the book Maximum Plunder: The Poster Art of Mike King, and Poster House, the first poster museum in the United States, will celebrate his body of work in a major exhibit called Copy/Paste/Print/Repeat: Mike King & the Art of the Gig Poster from April 24 through Nov. 2.

Here, King, a native of Portland, Ore., who has lived in Brooklyn the last 10 years, talks about his desire never to repeat himself and how the evolution of the digital world has influenced his work.

MUSE: Let’s settle this first: Do you prefer the term “gig poster” or “concert poster?” Both have been used to describe your work.

Mike King: I prefer “concert poster,” just because the word “gig” is stupid. Also, at this point, it’s been kind of co-opted by the gig economy and all of that sort of stuff.

Are you self-trained, or did you go to school for art?

I did not go to school. I managed to barely get through high school. I went to this hip school where they didn’t really care to teach me much, and I didn’t care to learn much. I had access to the art supply closet, and for some crazy reason, they taught us how to screen print, which was a weird thing to learn in high school. But I did. And that actually came in handy later.

Did you plan to be an artist?

I didn’t plan to be a designer. I just ended up being one. A lot of it came from just being a lay-about punk rocker playing in bands. Someone had to make the flyer—I guess it could be me.

I started making concert posters in earnest when I went into this promoter’s office trying to get a gig for my band. There was a guy over in the corner, and he was struggling mightily to make this flyer. And I was like, “Oh, I could do that.” I came back two hours later with the poster. And that’s what started the ball rolling.

Your work is so varied. How would you describe your aesthetic?

I’m an impatient artist. I’m an easily bored artist. And I’m also easily influenced by all kinds of things around me. There’s all the successful artists, all the ones that you go, “Oh, so-and-so made that!” I didn’t want to be that. I didn’t want to keep making the same thing over and over again. Though now, because of the sheer volume of things that I’ve done, yes, I am repeating myself. But I think I’m repeating myself from a broad enough range that it’s not repetitive.

How do you begin the process of making a poster for a band? Do you listen to their music first?

The last thing I ever want to do is listen to their music, because chances are really good that they’re terrible, because 99 percent of all bands are terrible. Just like 99 percent of everything is terrible—TV, movies, books. Most of it is trash, and I don’t want that to get in the way. So, if I’m working with a band that I don’t know anything about, I will go to their website and look at their T-shirts. That gives me an idea of what this is, what they’ll put their name on, what they’ll sell. That gives me a path for where I need to go.

How has the evolution of digital technology impacted your approach?

I’m a lot better than when I started out. The depth or breadth of influence is considerably larger than when I was young. I was just a dumb kid who only had access to whatever was around in what at the time was a very provincial town. There was no internet, there was none of that. We only knew stuff through print media or books. Now, the digital world has widened my resources in terms of what I can see and how I can steal other people’s things.

I think that a lot of the ways you get from A to B visually are accelerated by using a computer. But I also spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make stuff look like a shitty Xerox in Photoshop.