Danny Steinman: Folks Art

“When I go to see music, I close my eyes and I can sort of see my art,” Danny Steinman says of his work that has appeared on album covers, concert posters and even skis. He is particularly well known for the pins he has created for the Grateful Dead, Dave Matthews Band, Twiddle, moe., Umphrey’s McGee, Slightly Stoopid, Goose, Ween, Little Stranger, Tropidelic and many other groups. He also has done a few Relix collaborations.

Beyond his direct artistic endeavors, Steinman has fostered a robust community via his Pin Daddy Facebook group. He explains, “I always viewed the Grateful Dead and Phish communities as kind spaces of acceptance for freaks and weirdos, which I say lovingly. Then, when I started making pins, I noticed a lot of toxicity online in the communities that were selling them. So when I started my Facebook group, I wanted to capture the vibe of the lot in a kind space online.”

As for the notoriety of his pins, he reveals, “It was a really cool thing that developed organically. I was part of this scene buying art in the lot long before I thought of doing that stuff myself.”

You’re a music fan and musician in your own right. As you were growing up, did all that dovetail with your interest in visual art?

They both surfaced around the same time. Starting in about middle school, I began to feel the need to create and perform. That came out while I was involved in plays and in chorus. That’s also when I started with my doodling art style, which then took place in the margins of my notebook.

I’m 54 years old now and it was in the ‘70s when I fell in love with music. My parents had all The Beatles’ albums on 8-track and I’d listen to the Grease soundtrack as well. In middle school, I was in love with Led Zeppelin, Queen, The Doors, AC/ DC and all these incredible rock bands, but it wasn’t until I was 15 years old that the Grateful Dead found their way into my life, shifted my perspective and set me on a path that I’m still on.

A girl I was in school with turned me on to that music with bootleg tapes. Then, one day, I think it was 1985, we cut out of school and went to see the Grateful Dead at Brendan Byrne. That was incredible. It changed my life, and my fascination with jamband culture carried on through college. In 1992, I discovered Phish when I was in college, which took it to the next level of love and passion.

I’ve seen a video of you performing at Wetlands. At what point did you begin to explore that creative outlet?

In college, I just picked up a guitar. One of my roommates freshman year had an acoustic guitar and I learned to play “Wild Thing.” Then maybe a year or two into it, I became much more interested in writing and played a bunch of open mics.

After graduating from college, I went straight into teaching for a year, but was developing much more interest in music. So after a year of teaching, I took some time off and, for the next 10 years or so, I put together two bands. They were original bands and this was a much tougher time to market yourself. We didn’t have the internet and we certainly didn’t have social media. Everything was done with sending out postcards.

I managed the bands, I bought the van, I booked the shows and we did it for about 10 years. We had plenty of gigs where there were only five people there, but we also had some big ones, too. Around 2000, we won a contest on WLIR for the best unsigned band and we opened up for Pete Yorn at this place called the Vanderbilt, which was a nice venue on Long Island.

The typical things eventually got in the way, like drugs and people not wanting to give up everything else in their life for the sake of the band. It was a great time though, and one thing it also taught me was the power of being organized. Then, when I did go back to teaching, which was right around ‘99, I took those organizational skills back with me. I certainly took all that into running my business now.

During that era, were you creating art, if only for yourself?

I would make these fun, cartoony posters for the band. Then I would get them color copied, so that if we were doing a show in Toronto, I would send them a box of a hundred posters to put around the club and the neighborhood. So I was definitely starting to do art related with the band, although not to sell.

Was your poster art reminiscent of what you do today?

Probably, especially some of the lettering, because that’s a big part of my artwork. For me, words are super powerful. In the beginning, I’d do that sort of quick. Now, I spend so much time figuring out how to fit the words in without clutter and with the nice flow that I’m looking for.

How did you come to work with other bands?

The most critical thing to understand is that up until a few years ago, I was a New York City school teacher. I taught for 22 years. It was incredible and I took so much meaning from it but, around 2016, while I was still teaching, I also started craving a wider circle of energy.

At this point, I was already doing a lot of art, but we were just hanging them up in my house, and I maybe sold a couple to some neighbors in the Bronx.

But I was looking at my style of art, which, at this point, was completely abstract, and I said to my wife: “Maybe I can start to do this artwork and pair it with bands that I love, to create fan art with my style.” I remember we were sitting on my orange armchair in the living room and she was like, “Sure, go for it.”

So I did a fan-art piece with a lot of the characters from Phish songs and I shared it online in a couple of these Facebook groups. It got a really positive reaction. A couple months later, I made a bunch of prints of it and we sold 40 or so and we were really excited. It just kept going from there.

That’s when I caught a couple of nice breaks. The first one was more a source of inspiration. Early on, when I had been doing some writing, I interviewed Tom Marshall for a piece about Phish. He and I struck up a nice friendship, which still exists to this day. This was very early on, though, and I sent him this abstract psychedelic portrait that I did of Trey, and Tom told me how much he liked it. Then he said, “You know what? I think I’m going to show this to Trey.” He told me that they had an unwritten rule not to share fan art, just to let me know that we might not hear anything.

I was teaching at the time and I was driving home on the Palisades and pumping gas, when I got a text back from Tom with this screenshot from Trey reacting to it. It was in all caps and said, “HOLY CRAP, THAT IS AMAZING! I WOULD LOVE TO GET A PRINT OF IT!”

So I sent off a print with a nice note through Tom. Coming from someone whose music I absolutely love to this day, it’s served as a huge source of inspiration.

What were you teaching?

For the majority of my career, I taught sixth-grade science in the Bronx. Then, during COVID, my business went from doing about the same as I was doing in teaching to doing significantly better—to the point where I didn’t have to go back. It really was sort of that American dream thing, where I’d put in my time but I was starting to get tired.

Then, when it was time to come back to work and teach in a mask all day, I became uncomfortable with the whole aspect of what that was going to involve. So I decided to take a leave and try this thing out. I went to all these stakeholders in my life, including the principal of my school I worked at, who is an amazing friend. And she was like, “You should give it a shot, and anytime you need to come back, you can.” Eventually, I decided not to go back and I’m going to officially retire this summer.

Beyond that interaction with Tom and Trey, how did things develop?

Trey gave me inspiration and then I caught a nice break not long after that. I hadn’t yet worked in an official capacity with any bands at that time, I was just doing fan art—Dead pieces and Phish stuff—when Mihali Savoulidis, the singer and songwriter of Twiddle, reached out. He had been following my Instagram account and this was at the same time when I had been reading quite a bit about Twiddle.

He said, “Hey, man, I just love your work. I’ve been following you for a while, and I would be really honored if you would come and work with my band and maybe do an album cover.” So I ended up doing some posters and an album cover. I did tons of work with Twiddle and also his solo stuff.

Then a couple months later, I did some work with Stick Figure, Ween and moe. That was all me using my hustle—sending emails and sending photos and making my pitch.

That opened up this whole concept to me where I could work in an official capacity with these bands and create a circle of symbiosis, where I would gain more exposure by working with them, but at the same time, I would be promoting the bands to my fans.

What initially led you to pins?

This was about a year and a half or so into my effort—probably the summer of 2017. I used to go to all the Shakedown festivals. I was setting up and working all those hours and people kept telling me: “You should make pins. You should make pins!”

I knew about the pins people would get at Disney. I’m also a big skier, so as a kid, whenever we went to a different ski area, I would try and get a pin from the ski area.

So I had seen that collectible pin thing in various markets, but now I was discovering that there was one in the music market. Then at some point, I decided to try it out. I didn’t really know if my style was going to work for it because of the tremendous amount of detail. But it turns out that it works really well, as long as I stay within the parameters of the medium because you can’t become too detailed since it’s so small.

The first pin I released was for Mihali. It was a play on a high-top sneaker. I called it the Air Mihali. He brought it on tour and it sold out immediately. I offered artist variants online, and those also sold out right away. So I was like, “Well, this is something here,” and it kept going.

Can you describe the design process for creating a pin?

Let’s say I start with the outline of a flamingo, which I just did for the band Tropidelic. I always compare my style to jamband music, in that the outline of the flamingo is the song structure but what I do inside of it is the jam.

I begin with a pencil sketch for the outer general concept. The main drawing is going to be about 30” by 40.” I work in Sharpie and India Ink, so when I design the entire pin, it’s all in black.

After I get the outline down, then I go for a lot of improvisation on the inside. I often have an area mapped out in advance for the band name and maybe some other words, but otherwise I’ve got music playing and I just let go until I have the finished product, which is a 30” by 40” black line image.

Then I photograph it, and the image is vectored, which means it’s turned into a digital file. That’s when I add all the different colors in all those separate little chambers. We’ll also make variants of different metals, glitter and all that. Later, I’ll often go back and I’ll finish it in full color for something else, like a poster.

Can you think of a moment when you were taken aback by the interest for a particular pin?

In the beginning of COVID, the Bottleneck Gallery came to me asking if I wanted to do some official Grateful Dead designs for Grateful Dead Productions. So we did these Steal Your Face pins filled with my designs in between.

Then we did a timed pre order—I think this was in early ‘21—and we sold 25,000 pins in 24 hours, which was mind blowing. That was part of the COVID craze of everyone having a lot of time and being online. But it was incredible to be able to give back to the Dead after all those years of doing fan art.

Since then, I’ve done a bunch of other official designs with Bottleneck Gallery. I did these official Batman pins for DC Comics that were also a big seller. It was really exciting to tap into that market.

A lot of groups turned to you during COVID because they weren’t touring and needed to generate additional income through their merch. Looking back on that period of time, what comes to mind?

My phone, my texts and my email did not stop. So many bands came to me wanting to do pins as a way for them to sustain. Although COVID was an awful thing and so many people were suffering, it did create an opportunity for us to help these bands and grow the business. We raised millions for these bands over those two and a half years. There were pin drops twice a week, we were having contests, we were doing all sorts of stuff.

I was honored that these bands came to me and that I could help. The way my Facebook group works, it’s also been great to see a crossover of fans. So fans of Slightly Stoopid were turning on to Goose and vice versa. That’s been really incredible to watch.

Something else I want to say about the Facebook group during COVID is that it provided an opportunity for people who were disconnected and alone to connect with one another. They could wake up in the morning and check in with the group. I’ve heard people say, “We came here for the pins, but we stay here for the community.” The pins are the driving force, but they’re also a conduit to something bigger, which is human connection. To me that’s priceless, especially these days.

I always say to my kids that it’s all about energy for me. We’re all going to die. We’re all going to live for a certain amount of time. So what really matters to me is the kind of energy I put out there.

Speaking of that, we also have quite a lot of involvement with charity. We’ve done extensive work with Phish’s WaterWheel Foundation. Last year, my community also raised over $10,000 for Rock The Pink and the American Cancer Society.

All in all, I just feel very lucky to be doing something I love, where I’m able to see so much live music and it’s all part of what I do.