Beyond the Streets Revives a Hello Kitty Con Print from 2014

A poster made for the first Hello Kitty fan convention has returned from the archive. Beyond the Streets is offering the 2014 Hello Kitty Con LA print, a bright piece of event ephemera that gathers the place, dates, programming, and anniversary celebration into one dense composition.

The 18-by-24-inch work is a six-color screen print. Hello Kitty sits against a rainbow and star-filled blue field, while block lettering announces the convention’s run at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles. Smaller vignettes advertise the event’s mix of games, workshops, exclusives, and friends. Beyond the Streets describes the newly available copies as archival and notes that they may have slight imperfections.

A convention built around a character

Sanrio organized Hello Kitty Con 2014 as part of the character’s 40th-anniversary celebrations. Held from October 30 through November 2 at the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo, it was billed as the first fan convention devoted entirely to Hello Kitty. The four-day program combined a retrospective, rare collectibles, workshops, lectures, panels, art installations, photo opportunities, an arcade, and convention-only releases.

The event was unusual in scale and setting. By placing a character convention inside MOCA’s vast former warehouse, Sanrio allowed product culture, fan culture, design history, and contemporary art to occupy the same room. The poster mirrors that overlap. Its distressed display type and compressed, handbill-like hierarchy give the polished character system the energy of a street poster.

Event ephemera becomes an archive

Once the convention dates passed, the print’s practical job was finished. More than a decade later, those dates are precisely what make it interesting. They locate Hello Kitty at a specific moment when a globally recognized character became the center of a museum-scale gathering, and when anniversary merchandise doubled as a physical record of the community around it.

The current release is priced at $75 through Beyond the Streets. The retailer says prints ship separately in tubes and are sold as-is. Read the Beyond the Streets release announcement and Sanrio’s original overview of Hello Kitty’s 40th-anniversary program for more context.

Featured image: Hello Kitty Con LA archival six-color screen print, 2014. Courtesy Beyond the Streets and Sanrio.