D.King Gallery

D.King Gallery is a commercial art space with a focus on Rock Poster Art, owned and operated by author Dennis King since it opened in 1996 in Berkeley, California. The gallery has been an important cultural resource, existing concurrently with the rapid expansion of the modern rock poster art phenomenon, hosting exhibits of significant artists in the poster art field and maintaining a wide and disparate collection of classic rock posters dating back to the 1960s and including thousands of works by contemporary poster artists.

Major Exhibitions

One of the D.King Gallery's earliest major exhibitions, Revelations & Mixed Blessings, a collection of recent prints and sculpture by Joe Sances, showed in May 1997. Although he did a poster for a Santana/Reuben Blades concert, Sances is primarily known as a printmaker and sculptor.

From July 24 to August 30, 1997 D.King Gallery hosted the first major west coast exhibition of Cleveland-based artist Derek Hess, whose finely detailed illustration style departed from the predominant trends in rock poster art at the time.

Unmasked, a month-long exhibit running from mid-June to mid-July 1997, featured the paintings of Jeff Carr, including 1996’s The Hunt. Like Joe Sances, Carr’s contribution to the field of Rock Poster Art was limited, he having done a poster based on one of his large format paintings for the Japanese band Libido.

In October The Many Faces of Lee Conklin debuted new paintings by Conklin along with a large scale silkscreen print, Faces, a new version of Conklin’s BG #112 without any text obscuring the image as there was in the original. Conklin is well known for having done the first Santana album cover and more than 30 posters for the Fillmore.

Objects and Animals, a book signing event that took place in December 2009, celebrated poster artist Jay Ryan’s book Animals and Objects: Posters by Jay Ryan 2005-2008. Ryan appeared along with graphic novelist Paul Hornshemeier as part of the pair’s tour promoting Animals and Objects and Hornshemeier’s book, All and Sundry Uncollected Works 2004-2009.

A retrospective of the work of Scrojo, one of the most significant figures in the modern Poster Art field, ran from the last week of November through the end of December 2010 upon the completion of his 1,500th poster. Rare original drawings and smaller format screen prints were included in the exhibit.

The Rock Poster Society

Following Dennis King’s publication of The Rock Poster Collector, an attempt to organize the artists, fans, collectors, and dealers of rock posters and to provide a forum for the community, he helped Janis Smith and Larry Williams found what would become The Rock Poster Society in 1998 and D.King Gallery became the group’s meeting place. The gallery hosted a lecture and exhibition by veteran poster artist Lee Conklin in March, 1999 as a fundraiser for TRPS and a second event followed in July of the same year; Eyeball to Eyeball featured a sale, discussion, and signing by guest artist David Singer.

The Art of Modern Rock

The 2007 release of The Art of Modern Rock Mini #1: A-Z, which Dennis King authored, saw an October 17th book release party at the gallery, The Art of Modern Rock: Earthquake Ground Zero. King’s long-standing position as a notable collector and dealer of rock poster art had led to his being a major contributor to the 1987 book The Art of Rock and then co-author and art director of The Art of Modern Rock. He subsequently authored The Art of Modern Rock Mini #2: Poster Girls.

King's Baseball Cards

Dennis King’s first commercial business was King’s Baseball Cards, which also sold comics and rock posters, originally located in Berkeley’s Durant Mall. . As an authority on baseball cards, comic books, and rock posters, King is often consulted by other writers, academics, historians, and collectors. The refocusing of his business on Rock Poster Art when he opened D.King Gallery was, like his publication of Rock Poster Collector magazine and participation in the founding of The Rock Poster Society, an effort to create a cultural resource for artists, fans, collectors and others interested in rock poster art.