The posters made more money than the shows.
That's not a knock on the bands. It's the actual story of how Kilby Court survived its early years. Kilby couldn't survive on ticket sales alone. As an all-ages venue with no liquor license, the math never quite worked. Until Leia Bell started making posters.
The Workshop, the Screen, the Wall
Bell grew up in Tennessee and came to Utah for school, graduating with a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Utah. She was co-owner of Kilby Court alongside her husband Phil Sherburne, who founded the venue in 1999. But her real contribution was visual. Working out of Sherburne's workshop, Bell hand-crafted screen-printed fliers with a distinctive colorful, cartoon-like folk-art style. She plastered them across Salt Lake City for upcoming shows. Posters for Cursive, The Gloria Record, Sweep the Leg Johnny, and a 2002 show for The Manges became collector's pieces almost immediately.
In Sherburne's words
"Her posters made way more than the shows did." Not a figure of speech. Bell's artwork kept the venue financially afloat for several years.
Signed & Numbered
By the time Bell and Sherburne sold Kilby, they had amassed an archive of hundreds of signed and numbered prints from screen printers across the country. In January 2008 they used the proceeds from the sale to open something new: Signed & Numbered, a poster art shop and gallery underneath the old Slowtrain Records downtown, named in honor of that archive. The posters weren't a side hustle. They were the business model — and the gallery made that explicit.
Gigposters.com
When the art landed on gigposters.com, the audience went national. Bell's work gained international recognition on a platform where collectors and concert-goers traded posters like currency. The SLC poster scene got noticed because Bell's work made it impossible not to notice.
After 2008
Bell and Sherburne sold Kilby to Will Sartain and Lance Saunders on January 1, 2008. Erin and Nick Potter (Potter Press) inherited the Kilby art director role and kept the lo-fi screen-printing tradition going — directing fans to gigposters.com to find their expanding catalog. D.King Gallery still sells Bell's original Kilby prints.
The music came and went. The posters lasted.
Were you ever lucky enough to grab one of Bell's posters off the wall?
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