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Hatch Show Print’s Haley Gallery To Showcase New Exhibit Jim Sherraden: Personal Woodcuts

June 23, 2015

Exhibit Opens Friday, July 3, and Runs Through Saturday, August 8

NASHVILLE, Tenn., June 23, 2015—Hatch Show Print, a historic property of the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum since 1992 and one of the oldest working letterpress shops in America, will offer visitors a comprehensive look at the work of the shop’s master printer in a new installation Jim Sherraden: Personal Woodcuts. The exhibit will reside in Hatch Show Print’s Haley Gallery and will feature woodcut prints dating from the beginning of Sherraden’s 30-year career as a printmaker up to recent multimedia interpretations. The show will open during Nashville’s monthly FIRST SATURDAY ART CRAWL, taking place Friday, July 3, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. Hatch Show Print’s Haley Gallery will offer visitors complimentary wine and small bites, accompanied by a live pedal steel guitar performance by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Bob Kramer.

“Jim Sherraden has been an invaluable asset not only to Hatch Show Print and the Haley Gallery, but to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum as a whole,” said Sharon Brawner, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “He’s been instrumental in making Hatch Show Print a “destination” for graphic designers, and his unique personal woodcuts are admired worldwide. Being able to house this rare art form in the Haley Gallery here at the museum is truly an honor for us.”

Sherraden was introduced to Hatch Show Print in 1984 by a Vanderbilt University art instructor who noticed Sherraden’s wood and linoleum prints hanging in a local restaurant. Sherraden visited Hatch, and shortly thereafter was offered an opportunity to work at the shop, where he spent the next several years as shop manager and curator, overseeing the collection of one of Nashville’s most iconic landmarks.

In 1992, Sherraden began creating artwork from the shop’s collection of hand-cut blocks, designed and carved by shop co-founder Charles Hatch’s son Will T. Hatch and the shop staff. Sherraden’s contemporary creations from the historic blocks—monoprints—are collected by individuals and institutions worldwide. In 2005, Sherraden returned to carving his own woodcuts, developing a new body of work that includes the artist cutting up his printed pieces and mixing and matching the patchwork imagery, resulting in quilt-like compositions.

“Over the past thirty years, my work has been influenced by everything from Northern European expressionism to the outsider art of the American South, including, of course, the thousands of posters I’ve made at Hatch Show Print,” said Sherraden.

In 2013 Sherraden received a Distinguished Artist of the Year Award from the state of Tennessee. He has overseen dozens of exhibits, including one that featured Hatch Show Print and traveled for four years in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution. The upcoming exhibition surveys over three decades of Sherraden’s printmaking, displayed in Hatch Show Print’s Haley Gallery which resides at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

To learn more about Jim Sherraden and his work, click here.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter @HatchShowPrint, and join the conversation using #HaleyGallery.

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Founded by the brothers Charles and Herbert Hatch, this iconic shop opened in Nashville in 1879. For much of the twentieth century, the shop’s vibrant posters served as a leading advertising medium for Southern entertainment, and included work for many members of the Grand Ole Opry such as Bill Monroe, Minnie Pearl, and Ernest Tubb, and for rock & roll icons such as Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. Thousands of posters and billboard-size advertisements were printed for traveling vaudeville and minstrel shows, circuses, and carnivals barnstorming across the country. In 1992, Hatch Show Print became a historic property of the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum. Today, Hatch Show Print is a thriving letterpress poster and design shop in downtown Nashville, with seven full-time designer-printers on staff. The shop creates and prints 500-600 poster jobs every year, and the client list ranges from Mumford & Sons to Willie Nelson, and includes brands such as Fossil, Taschen, and the U.S. Postal Service. For more information about tours or the history of the shop, visit www.hatchshowprint.com.