The People being the Pinc.

The diversity of the art events at Oberlin can be seen everywhere around campus. There are posters for art openings. There are posters for theater and dance productions. There are posters for concerts ranging from contemporary art music to rock and roll and hip hop. There are posters everywhere, announcing every kind of artistic event imaginable, but ironically, some of the most substantial art on this campus is found in the posters themselves.

Founded last August by former Oberlin art student Anya Lownie and former British rock and roller Neal Pearson, the corporation called Pinc. is anything but low profile. Walking around Oberlin's campus this year it became impossible not to be affected by their work, which has covered almost every kind of event in any way related to the college.

In years past Oberlin has always had silk screen projects, but nothing on the kind of scale that Pinc. works with. Dealing with 65 clients to produce well over 3,200 original silk screened posters, Pinc. has become more than just a job to these two artists; it is has become their life.

"We had to make a decision between working at the Mandarin or the Feve, and making posters for a living," said Lownie

So that is what they did, and Pinc. was born.

"The name is a multiple play on words," said Lownie. "The 'p' can be for posters or printers or anything. Of course we are too small to really be incorporated, but we wanted the name to be kind of official sounding. And the pink part. Nobody likes the color pink. So it was also a kind of celebration of tasteless colors and about putting them together. But if you put the 'k' on the end then it kind of reads 'printers ink'"

But Pinc. is about a lot more than just printing ink. Hours of labor go into the posters from the initial concepts through the final stages of the printing, arguably making them more legitimate than the events they advertise. Between 20 and 40 hours of work go into each poster by the time it hits the walls of Oberlin.

"People don't really believe us when we tell them how much time it takes us to do the posters," said Lownie, "but what they don't really understand is that a lot of the time four or five hours will go in to just the initial conceptual stages."

The two artists are responsible for every step of the process. In most cases the poster design in layout is completely under their direction.

"The most ideal situation is when a client just hands us a piece of paper with the relevant information and lets us do our own thing," said Pearson.

Doing their own thing with the posters became more than a full time job. When Pinc. was just getting off the ground Pearson and Lownie calculated that they were making just over a few dollars an hour and only one of the projects made them minimum wage.

"The goal of the second semester was just to start making a sustainable living. At the beginning of the semester we were doing okay, and as the semester progressed things got better," said Lownie. As the year went on the business developed from the first posters that Pearson and Lownie worked on together last spring. The duo was able to create higher quality screens faster. The semester included four weeks of more than 70 hours of labor, and a stretch where Pinc. produced five posters in five days.

"We are just now figuring the ins and outs of being a business so we just say yes to everything." said Pearson.

When dealing with so many clients, especially considering most of the clients are artists, things didn't always go so smoothly.

"Some of them were a nightmare," said Lownie. "There are always people who are impossible to please."

"One thing we can't stand is when people want to see things before they are finished," added Pearson. "If we operated in the real world, where designers make $10 an hour, it would be no problem to show someone all the proofs they wanted. Much of the design comes together when we make the templates, and looking at it half done doesn't really tell you anything of what it is going to look like when it is finished."

"The work has got to be instantaneously appealing," said Pearson. "We started off making posters that satisfied our aesthetic, whereas now we are trying to make posters that would work in the real world, not just in Oberlin, where we monopolized the market."

But the real world will have to wait. Pinc. is leaving Oberlin in June, and the two are planning to end things with one of the biggest projects yet. Working for the development office Pinc. has taken on a project to create a series of prints commemorating different benefactors and buildings in the college's history. The works created in honor of such famous names as Mudd and King, were left completely under the direction of Pearson and Lownie. Without the limitations of some of the text-heavy assignments Pinc. has tackled in the past, the series is possibly the most ambitious undertaking in the short history of the business.

"It is an ideal project. We were given total control of it, and it is ideal because nothing is really crowding the images. We're only using numerical and architectural elements to represent the buildings," said Lownie.

"It has been the most challenging and the most rewarding of the projects. The series will go up in succession in the fall."

When it goes up look closely because by the fall Pinc. won't be here for the project's unveiling. Pearson and Lownie plan to travel through out the United States for four or five months, staying with friends and different contacts, and leaving a gaping hole in the Oberlin's advertising market.

"We basically created the market for this type of thing," said Pearson. "We definitely did a lot for furthering the cause of capitalism in Oberlin."

But Pinc. did a lot more than that by plastering the campus with some of the most legitimate art that the campus saw this year.