The Argonaut sat down for a question and answer session with Fine Arts Department professor Aaron Cordell Johnson to discuss his recent project of designing the Lionel Hampton Jazz Fest 2020 poster. 

You mentioned that they asked you to design the JazzFest poster, tell me more about that.

The folks behind the Jazz Festival asked the art department, if we could get some faculty involved in designing the poster. This is my first year at the U of I. So, (Gregory Turner-Rahman), the chair of the art department, asked if I would design it and I said, ‘Sure.’ 

Could you walk me through the process you had as a first-year professor at this university making this poster?

I graduated here in 2011 with my MFA. I’ve worked since 2011 until last year at Lewis-Clark State College teaching down there, and then I did some adjuncting up here. Throughout the year I’ve been connected to the university. This is my first year officially teaching.

I asked (Jazz Festival Manager Josh Skinner) about getting some access to past Jazz Festival photographs, and he sent me a link with — I don’t know some ridiculous amount of photographs. It was either like 30,000 images or something like that through the archives, and I just kind of went through and was trying to find an image that matched a thought, if that makes sense. I didn’t have a design set, but I had a thought of an image … It’s a former performer. I don’t know who the guy is because I cropped it and it’s kinda silhouetted — you couldn’t see his face. 

How does it feel to you to have a jazz festival poster that is the official one? 

It’s kind of weird … So, I saw they do a limited run. And yesterday I picked up 150 of them and I signed them all. I’ve never done that before. Usually what I make is one thing. I’ve never had that experience before. 

It was enjoyable to do something out of my normal — what I typically paint I mean. I look at it as a painter, no matter what I am painting. The challenges: composition, value, color, design, all those problems. And those problems are going to be the same whether I’m making a poster, a landscape painting, a figurative painting, or an abstraction. All of those things still have to deal with those same basic design principles. 

Kali Nelson  can be reached at  [email protected]  or on Twitter @kalinelson6