Female artists featured in “Street Art Graphics” digital archive

In 2017, after receiving a faculty research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service to continue cataloguing stickers for the Street Art Graphics digital archive, I spent four weeks in Berlin collecting political stickers and learning about the issues they communicated. My collaborator, Oliver Baudach, founder and director of the Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum, also identified 954 original, unused stickers from his collection of street art stickers for me to scan while I was there, of which 322 were done by female artists.

In 2019, with a second grant from the U.S. Council of Independent Colleges’ Consortium on Digital Resources for Teaching and Research, Oli and I organized a traveling exhibition called SHE SLAPS: Street Art Stickers by Women Artists from Around the World, which premiered at the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY) in the fall of 2019. (See my previous post about the project here.) In preparation for the show, Oli put out a call for new donations and came to campus with an additional 446 stickers by female artists.

Arline and Oli at SLU, 2019
Organizing sticker boards for “SHE SLAPS” exhibition, 2019

Now, three years later from when this all began, I am delighted to announce that we’ve added 762 stickers by female artists to the Street Art Graphics digital archive. That’s 23.1% of stickers in the collection that currently numbers 3,296. There are undoubtedly more stickers by women than that percentage, but those are the ones that have been identified by Oli. Special thanks to SLU’s Arline Wolfe who oversaw the cataloguing of these stickers with help in 2017 from Tyler Senecharles, Class of 2020 (pictured below) and in 2019-20 from Kayla Edmunds, Class of 2021, and Anica Koontz-Miller, Class of 2022.

Tyler Senecharles, SLU ’20, cataloguing stickers, 2019

Oli is undoubtedly one of the world’s leading expert on street art stickers. He keeps meticulous records on artists’ names, geographic locations, and dates, which are so important in cataloguing these items. “Very German,” he’d say. (Note: there are another 632 scans of stickers from 2017 to put in the cataloguing hopper when the time comes.)

Office at Hatch Kingdom
Oli is part of the SLU family, ca. 2015

Here is how to get to the female artists in the Street Art Graphics digital archive: Click on https://library.artstor.org/#/collection/87730635. Type in “female artists” in the search bar (without quotes). You’ll see 1,027 results. Scroll down on the left to Contributor and click on St. Lawrence University for 762 stickers by female artists.