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WASHBURN, Wis. – “All we hear about is the North Shore. We don’t hear about the South Shore,” Jamie Penny-Ritter said. “But we have all these beautiful little places here that people absolutely love, and when you discover that and come back, it’s almost like an addiction.”
If you have a Northland travel poster on your wall, or on a magnet, or mug, there’s a good chance it was designed by Penny-Ritter. This is especially true if it represents a small town, state park, or local landmark that is not advertised in travel agencies or airports.
Penny-Ritter last week at 14 E. “No one has really done travel posters in this area before,” she said, sitting in her cozy studio on Bayfield St. “People really enjoy it. There are a lot of small towns in this area.”
The Bemused Gallery and Studio walls of Penny-Ritter’s shop are completely filled with prints of her designs. All are made in fixed-rectangular sizes, and most are styled after vintage travel posters with the name of an area printed in bold letters on top of an image.
Some of the sights are quite familiar: Aerial Lift Bridge, Split Rock Lighthouse, Madeleine Island Ferry. Others are a little more local: Gordon Fire Tower, Raspberry Island Lighthouse, Giant muskie at Hayward Freshwater Fishing Hall. “I like to say it’s the largest collection of Northern Wisconsin travel posters in the history of the world, because it probably is,” Penny-Ritter said.
Jade Carlson/Advanced Telegram
This year’s best-selling Penny-Ritter poster may also contain the most obscure reference in her oeuvre. It shows the Stanberry Railroad Bridge crossing US Highway 63 between Hayward and Spooner. The artist has faithfully covered the bridge with his perennial graffiti message, “Sponsor Blows.”
“I released this on April 1 when I was on spring break,” Penny-Ritter laughed. “So I’m in Charleston, and my phone is blowing up because people are like, ‘Oh my God, I need that.'” A couple bought the poster as a wedding gift.
As it happens, the artist’s first poster image was inspired by a wedding. Penny-Ritter created a beautiful portrait of them standing on Bayfield Beach with Madeleine Island in the background as a gift to celebrate a relative’s wedding. After the 1930s, she saw travel posters promoting her former home, Bermuda.
Jade Carlson/Advanced Telegram
The enthusiastic response made Penny-Ritter think, “Maybe I’m on to something.” That was eight years ago and 160 posters ago. “I should retire when I have a thousand posters,” she said. “This is a long-term bucket list goal.”
The Penny-Ritter style harkens back to the Art Deco era of the early 20th century, when poster artists were influenced by Cubism and Futurism to create visuals with clean lines and strong blocks of color. Travel posters created by the WPA Federal Art Project in the 1930s and 40s are particularly touchstones for Penny-Ritter’s designs for Wisconsin state parks.
Each poster takes 12 hours to create for Penny-Ritter – longer if they are more complex. (Her Lift Bridge poster took about 30 hours, she said.) Penny-Ritter, a photographer, typically starts with a reference photo and draws it using Adobe Illustrator.
Jade Carlson/Advanced Telegram
Where did she learn her digital painting skills? “I like to talk about the streets and the backstreets, because I didn’t go for it,” says the artist, who attended college in her hometown and studied communication arts and sociology at Wisconsin Advanced University. In the year After graduating in 1997, she worked in media, moving first to Bermuda (“Why not?”) and then to San Diego with her husband, Jason. Two decades later, the couple returned to the South Shore, where Penny-Ritter took a job working in marketing for Big Top Chowqua.
Penny-Ritter didn’t quit her day job until her art grew into a sustainable business. “The art is the easy part,” said the mother of two. “The business is the hardest part. I could do this all day and not make any money, but I don’t want to be a starving artist.”
Jade Carlson/Advanced Telegram
Last year she was ready to rent a shop and studio. Bemused is located on the first floor of a beautiful Romanesque Revival building that was originally the home of the Bayfield County Bank. The closet is literally a treasure trove. “The original front door ended up in the museum,” Penny-Ritter said, referring to the Washburn Area Historical Museum across the street.
Perhaps the museum and neighboring Legion Park attract so much attention that locals forget the Bemused building exists. “When I tell people where I am, they say, ‘There’s no building there,'” Penny-Ritter said.
For the next several months, Penny-Ritter’s work will also be on display at Duluth International Airport. “They felt good about the airport,” said Tricia Hobbs, a senior economic developer for the city of Duluth. “People are coming home to or visiting this amazing area, and so it was great to be able to represent so many iconic places that they know and love or experience.”
Jay Galler/Duluth News Tribune
Thirty-two Penny-Ritter prints are displayed in the airport’s second-floor lobby outside security checkpoints in eight cases. One of the pieces on display is a new poster depicting the airport. “This is a Northwest Airlines airplane from 1956,” says the artist, depicting a mid-century aesthetic that evokes a more glamorous era of air travel. “As soon as it was released, the airport architect ordered one.”
In what she describes as “backhanded praise,” Penny-Ritter often questions whether her posters are antiques. “I was like, oh, no, they’re babies. Even the ‘old’ ones are only eight years old. I made[each poster]look old, but it’s new.”
The popular Twitter account @ratemyskyperoom awarded US Sen. Tammy Baldwin a full 10/10 and cited the “delightful Wisconsin print series” behind the Democrat during a remote appearance on MSNBC. In 2020, they gained national fame.
Based in La Pointe, Wisc., Madeline Island Candles stocks a selection of Penny-Ritter designs — including some of these Baldwin accolades. Co-owner Michael Childers said the images are “very popular” with customers.
“People come back and collect them year after year,” Childers said. “One of the most popular prints we carry is the lake at Big Bay Town Park. That’s something they experience, and can take home as a souvenir.”
Jade Carlson/Advanced Telegram
Although she’s only been in her studio since last year, Penny-Ritter says, “I feel like I’m getting bigger and I need a bigger building.” She hopes to stay in her current store as long as possible, but with posters crowding every square foot of display space, she says, “I need three more walls.”
The passion for high-end local posters shows no sign of letting up: Even as she shows off her design process, Penny-Ritter’s phone rings an alarm that another sale is coming through her website. Local businesses regularly contact her to order custom posters, and whenever she travels to sell her work at art shows or, like the recent Sail Festival in Two Harbors, she has to plan ahead.
“If I go to a show in a city and I don’t have a poster with that city’s name on it,” she said, “I don’t listen to the end of the day.”
Jade Carlson/Advanced Telegram
Jade Carlson/Advanced Telegram
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