Santa Barbara Signs & Graphics recently printed and donated 45 gallery prints and two banners for the retrospective gallery show for KTUH-FM, the University of Hawaii’s student-operated FM station.
The show consists of full color and black-and-white gallery prints ranging from 13-inch-by-19-inch to 24-inch-by-36-inch, along with two full-color event banners.
A highlight of the exhibition is a large photo of the KTUH staff taken in 1970 alongside a similar staff photo taken in 2009. The gallery show includes displays of broadcasting equipment used from the 1970s to the present.
Fred Barbaria, president of Santa Barbara Signs & Graphics, attended a showing in September in Honolulu of the 40th anniversary documentary about the radio station (Barbaria co-founded KTUH and was the station’s first general manager).
“When I spoke with the KTUH staff, they were very excited about being offered the opportunity to showcase the radio station’s 40-plus-year history for an entire semester in the Hamilton Library’s campus gallery,” Barbaria said. “They did not know how they were going to be able to afford having the prints produced professionally, so I offered to make the gallery prints for them as my way of giving back to an institution that gave so much to me.”
Barbaria graduated from the University of Hawaii with a bachelor’s degree in graphic design in 1971.
The station staff dug through its archives of photos, old program guides, newspapers, even an FCC license or two, and scanned any items that looked interesting.
“Documentation was never a strong point of the station,” Barbaria said. “We were having too much fun ‘doing’ to document what was going on, so it was a real challenge to figure out when some photos were taken as well as who was in them.”
Some of the older photos were even posted on Flickr for comments and identification by staff alumni. The gallery show opened recently and runs through May.
The gallery show donation was acknowledged (alongside an article about KTUH and Barbaria) in the latest edition of the University of Hawaii College of Arts & Sciences newsletter, Ke Kumu ‘Ike. Click here and view Page 11 for more information.
Santa Barbara Signs & Graphics, 3019 State St., specializes in large format printing for vehicle wraps, trade show graphics and interior branding projects.
— Jason Barbaria is the director of sales and marketing for Santa Barbara Signs & Graphics.