I’m pretty sure that Marisa Zarczynski ’ 06 was the first student at St. Lawrence University to help me with my budding sticker research project back in the early 2000s. We reconnected again lately, and she introduced me to an artist friend of hers from Brooklyn who collects stickers, Morgan Jesse Lappin. Here is his sticker story. “My sticker collection started in the early 80s in Rockland County, NY. My mother would take me to the supermarket, and I’d get a bunch of random stickers and the newest MAD Magazine. One day my mother gave me an empty photo album…
Adding images of I.W.W. ”stickerettes” to Wikipedia pages
Today is Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary, so it’s a good time to share some of my recent Wikipedia activities. For the past couple of years, I’ve been adding images of I.W.W. “stickerettes” to various Wikipedia pages. The stickerettes, which were published before 1925, are in the public domain, so copyright is not an issue. Here is how I add images to Wikipedia: You will first need to create an account or log into an existing account on Wikimedia Commons at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. After logging in, click on either the “Upload file” under “Participate” on the left – or on the blue “Upload”…
“Takin’ it to the Street and Stickin’ it to the Man: Cultural and Political Resistance in Contemporary Sticker Art” – Part I
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[Note: This blog post is based on the first national paper I gave on street art stickers for the annual College Art Association conference in February 2008 as part of a panel on “The Vernacular Print in Contemporary Art” chaired by Beauvais Lyons. I have updated some of the links and images to reflect more current resources.] In this paper, I examine contemporary sticker art as a form of cultural and political resistance, using primary examples collected since 2003 from the United States, Germany, and Canada. In the first half of the paper, I provide an overview of the “how,…
Confirmed date for early I.W.W. “stickerettes”
Some time ago, I learned about I.W.W. “stickerettes” that are in the University of Arizona’s Special Collections as part of the Bisbee Deportation Legal Papers and Exhibits AZ 114. I had taken screen shots of them to do additional research, but the website they were found on is now no longer active. What is useful, however, is that I can now identify the original 15 designs that were the earliest I.W.W political stickers in the United States (women’s suffrage stickers and stamps were also produced at this time). I’m pretty sure I.W.W leader and commercial artist Ralph Chaplin designed most…
The Government Has Blood on Its Hands
An article in The Washington Post this past week entitled A Death Every 30 Seconds revealed this sobering statistic regarding the COVID-19 crisis, which is currently at its highest rate of infection in the United States since the pandemic began. The article states that “every time you listen to Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas,’ about five people have died of the virus between the beginning and the end of the song…. On Sept. 12, the number of new cases began to increase, rising from about 34,000 new cases a day to, at this point, more than 219,000. The number of deaths…
“Slap Me Baby” interview
Folks from the Slap Me Baby sticker collective in Switzerland contacted me in the spring of 2020 to submit an essay on I.W.W. “stickerettes” and to respond to some interview questions for their next zine. They also sent me some great artists’ and political stickers, which are in the queue to be scanned and catalogued into the Street Art Graphics digital archive. Zine #3 can be purchased on the Slap Me Baby website here. I read the interview again today and decided to publish it on Stickerkitty, too. Can you describe in short words how your interest in stickers began…
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…
Working from home during the COVID-19 crisis: Post #3
I continue to work from home on digital image collection projects that I outlined in my first post from this COVID-19 series, focusing now on a series of confocal miscroscopy images generated by two faculty at St. Lawrence University: Jill Pflugheber, Microscopy Specialist, and Dr. Steven F. White, Lewis Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures. This digital project grew out of an exhibition this past spring at the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at SLU called Microcosms: A Homage to the Sacred Plants of the Americas. Here is the exhibition text panel that the two faculty wrote to accompany the…
Working from home during the COVID-19 crisis: Post #2
Today’s online text chat with Jstor Support: Catherine Tedford Apr 6, 15:45 EDT Chat started: 2020-04-06 07:32 PM UTC (07:32:23 PM) Catherine Tedford: Hello! I am cleaning up some metadata fields in St. Lawrence University’s Street Art Graphics collection and trying to revise some text in the Rights field. I don’t seem to have a way to do that myself. Is that something you do on your end? The sentence currently reads like this:For information about the St. Lawrence University Street Art Graphics Digital Archive, see http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/copyright/. And I’d like it to read like this:See http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/copyright/. I’m also not seeing default text…
Working from home during the COVID-19 crisis: Post #1
Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, I’ve decided to write about some of the work I’m doing for St. Lawrence University, where I serve as gallery director. I’m hoping I’ll still write about street art stickers here on Stickerkitty, but I’ve been too distracted lately to put my energies there. I’ve also decided to post some materials I’ve compiled over the past few years on family history, especially regarding my father, Rev. Dr. Duane W. Smith, who was active in the U.S. civil rights, women’s rights, and prison reform movements throughout his life. I’ve debated on posting about my dad for several…