SHELBURNE, Vt. (April 2, 2025)—This spring, Shelburne Museum presents Sound, Art, & Ink: Higher Ground Gig Posters, an exhibition that captures the intersection of music, design and printmaking. On view from May 10 through October 26, Sound, Art, & Ink features 270 hand-crafted gig posters that chronicle 27 years of artistic collaboration, commemorating unforgettable musical moments at Vermont’s beloved Higher Ground as well as at Shelburne Museum.
“Sound, Art, & Ink celebrates a creative collaboration that melded music and design to memorialize magical moments in the ephemeral form of the gig poster,” said Kory Rogers, Francie and John Downing Senior Curator of American Art and co-curator of the exhibition.
Nearly three decades ago, Higher Ground co-owner Alex Crothers, with his keen instinct for emerging talent, partnered with Solidarity of Unbridled Labour (formerly JDK Design), a Burlington-based design studio with an international client portfolio, to create posters for Higher Ground’s shows. Solidarity’s design vision would become a reality at the hands of Iskra Print Collective, a nonprofit printmaking cooperative. The partnership led to more than 300 commissioned limited-edition works commemorating select concerts.
“Shelburne Museum is the perfect venue for this exhibition. Higher Ground founded and has long produced Ben & Jerry’s Concerts on the Green at the Museum, and many of the musicians featured in the gig posters on view in the exhibition performed just a stone’s throw away in the museum’s natural amphitheater,” Crothers said. “Seeing these vibrant works of art will no doubt bring back fond memories of musical moments over the decades.”
Higher Ground has been at the center of Vermont’s music scene, drawing an extraordinary range of artists to the state—from rising stars to legendary icons including Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, Busta Rhymes, and Grace Potter.
“This unique collab produced meticulously screen-printed designs that commemorate fleeting moments of sound, transforming them into vibrant works of art that embody the spirit and energy of each event,” said Carolyn Bauer, Curator at Shelburne Museum and co-curator of the exhibition.
In the summer months, Higher Ground is the engine behind the Ben & Jerry’s Concerts on the Green series at Shelburne Museum, where musicians play outdoors against a breathtaking backdrop of the sun setting over the Adirondack Mountains. This season Shelburne Museum is offering half-price admission to Concerts on the Green ticketholders, so they can catch Sound, Art, & Ink. In addition, thanks to a partnership with preferred property Hilton Garden Inn Burlington, concertgoers can get special room rates. For details visit shelburnemuseum.org/visit/concerts/
For a schedule of 2025 concerts, visit https://shelburnemuseum.org/visit/concerts/.
High-resolution images are available for download HERE.
Download a PDF version of this press release HERE.
Image credit: Designed by Malcolm Buick, J.J. Cale, July 8, 2002. Silkscreen print on paper, 26 x 22 in. Courtesy of Alex Crothers, Iskra Print Collective, and Solidarity of Unbridled Labour.
About Shelburne Museum
Founded in 1947 by trailblazing folk art collector Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, is the largest art and history museum in northern New England and Vermont’s foremost public resource for visual art and material culture. The Museum’s 45-acre campus is comprised of 39 buildings including the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education and Webb Gallery featuring important American paintings by Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, John Singleton Copley and many more. For more information, please visit shelburnemuseum.org.
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