It was over a month ago when I found myself traveling to Orlando, Florida not for a roots check, but to visit the Orlando Museum of Art on the final [HELD OVER!] day of the third, and largest, exhibit of Punk and New Wave Graphics in America as taken from the Andrew Krivine collection. I’ve written about the collection before. It was the subject of a pair of books, the first covered here, and in a case of synchronicity, I was reading the second which was given to me on my birthday last year by a good friend when all of this happened.

Bettter still, this was an occasion where I got to spend time with such backbones of the PPM community as Mr. Ware [and his family] and the almighty Echorich. The last time we’d all been together was in 2018 at the Atlanta Simple Minds concert so this was a long time coming! I had first met up with Echorich at the 2013 Simple Minds concert that we attended [with chasinvictoria] in Washington D.C. and I was afraid that I might not be able to see the gent without Simple Minds present! But of course, Simple Minds were present by proxy, as we’ll see!

We first began the day with a proper breakfast, courtesy of the Wares. Echorich drove over from the Tampa Bay area and I had arrived the day before, overnighting with The Wares. Their son, The Warewolf, has his own music blog and he arrive on the scene to dine and accompany us. I have fond memories of shopping for records with a big pack of Mr. Ware’s and our friends as the youngster gave crate diving a chance and found that he liked it.

The museum opened by noon, and we headed over to the site where there was plentiful free parking and a senior citizen like myself could obtain admission for a scant $12.00! I was incredulous when I asked Mr. Ware about buying timed tickets in advance and he scoffed it all off! I’ve not been to a museum in 25 years at least [From The Louvre to my local…and all points in between] where this was not deemed necessary! Incredible.

The show featured hundreds of examples of Punk and New Wave print design [and more] as carefully curated by the forward thinking Andrew Krivine. Who stored all of this material [for decades] realizing that it was an incredible glimpse of a foundational era in music and art. That he’s managed to turn it into two hardcover volumes [so far] which are a steal at the price they’re going for means that he’s finally getting a little return on the investment that storing all of this represented over 40+ years.

That three museum shows have been mounted on the backs of those books [with another show preceding the publication of the first one] speaks to the vitality and breadth of the collection. Since I took over a hundred photos that I am [mostly] sharing in this post, we’ll have to use slideshows that break down the show’s thrusts by necessity. Also present was a sub-gallery focused on the photography of the legendary Sheila Rock, which was another big plus. Going into this I was definitely looking to buy the “Too fast To Live – Too Young To Die” first Krivine volume which I still needed, but as we;ll see, I got more than I bargained for as we exited through the gift shop.

The New Wave bucket will be holding the most of the materials here.

Malcolm Garrett was deemed so crucial to the show that he was one of three designers singled out by name in the curation. I can never forget seeing the first Garrett cover art I’d ever seen with the brilliant and colorful Buzzcocks “Different Kind Of Tension” artwork.

Peter Saville was another designer given their own placement in the show. He was a classmate at Manchester Polytech of Malcolm Garrett and together they were the enfants terrible of the New Wave and Post-Punk era. Saville embraced Classicism while Garrett preferred Modernism.

The significance of synthesizers was called out as an important thread of the New Wave movement within the show.

The visual vitality of the New Romantic movement meant that this show paid a lot of attention to The Cult With No Name. The Visage and Ultravox images from the Saville section, could also be here.

The show also incorporated elements of fashion which were intrinsic to the era.

The Sheila Rock sub-gallery primarily showed her crucial photos from the New Romantic movement period on ’79-’81, and were in black + white. But the occasional color image was still there.

Looking back it’s hard to believe that Orlando was where all of this design had collected for public view. The records alone 45 years ago were hard enough to find! I managed to get a lot of these records in local store, but many was the time that the one copy I saw of something was something I snapped up to never see on sale again. When we hit the gift shop on the way out I was intending to purchase the first Krivine tome, now that I was reading the second one.And they duly had it there. $45 I was happy to spend. But they had more than that to buy!

I had missed the “Reasons To Be Cheerful” book on Barney Bubbles over a decade ago. Back when I still bought from Amazon it could be had for chump change, but there were always record to buy first. Then for the last decade, OOP copies were a solid three figures! Yet I found the latest [most complete] printing at the show with a completely new look [and title] for only $40, so I pounced on it.

And finally, I had been aware of the French Sheila Rock signed/numbered edition of “New Romantics.” It was not prohibitively expensive but the postage from France always dampened my enthusiasm. Imagine my glee as I saw copies on a shelf within my grasp! The book came with a set of postcards, bookmarks, and two posters tipped into the cover. I ended up spending almost $150 [after taxes] on books this day. And I have been selling off my library for years with new additions coming in at a snail’s pace. But not this day.

-30-