Last weekend, I found four copies of a “white power” sticker stuck on street poles and signs in a small town called Potsdam near where I live and work (a place that gets few stickers, if any). Potsdam and Canton, ten miles down the road, are both college towns in rural, northern New York with four universities and several thousands of students. Canton is the St. Lawrence County seat. Our closest big city is Ottawa, the capital of Canada. I call this part of the state purple after NY Congressional District 21 voted twice for Barack Obama in the U.S.…
Stickerkitty is baaaack!
Hola! Stickerkitty is baaack (yay!) after working for the past 15 months as a senior volunteer for NY-21 Congressional candidate Tedra Cobb. Tedra, a Democrat, didn’t win in November, but the experience was powerful in terms of grassroots community building—something that is sorely needed in the United States right now. Tedra ran an honest, clean campaign, but the numbers in this rural northern NY district favored Republicans by something like 40,000 votes. Aside from Tedra herself, who is incredible, one of the most remarkable aspects of her campaign was her base of 2,000 volunteers who carried petitions, hosted house parties…
Stickers in the classroom: GER 103 – Politische Plakate und Aufkleber* in Deutschland
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In the fall of 2017, I worked with a German professor at SLU, Brook Henkel, on a writing assignment for students in his Intermediate German 103 course. In preparation, I had scanned all of the political stickers that Oliver Baudach had given me in 2017 in order to keep the content as current as possible. (Oli, the founder and director of Hatch Kingdom, is my primary source for political stickers in Germany.) This writing assignment was different than the assignments I did with Marina Llorente in 2012 and 2014 (+ Part I – annotating images) that focused on political stickers…
Montreal Anarchist Bookfair 2017
I went to the 2017 Montreal Anarchist Bookfair last May to look for stickers after having gone to fairs there for that purpose every year from 2012 to 2015 (but missing the one in 2016). The fairs feature book publishers, primarily, but some of the vendors also sell or give away stickers (or offer them as PWYW – pay what you will). Others participating in the fair usually include such groups as the Beehive Design Collective, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and the Quebec Public Interest Research Group at Concordia. Several presentations, hands-on workshops, and an art exhibition are also part of…
Close Up: Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum
History of the collection and museum Oliver Baudach is the founder and director of Hatch Kingdom (Berlin, Germany), the world’s first and only museum devoted to stickers. He first started collecting stickers in the early 1980s as a young teenager in a small village called Speyer in southern Germany. He clearly remembers buying a wallet at the time from Skull Skates and finding “one of the best skull stickers [he had] ever seen.” He subsequently started collecting stickers related to skateboard culture, streetwear, and punk rock bands like the Misfits and the Ramones. In the 1990s, after graduating from high…
Stickers and Political Graphics in the Age of #45
My complacent little bubble world has been turned upside down since the November 2016 U.S. election of #45 POTUS. As a result, Stickerkitty blogging has been forced to take a back seat to community organizing, weekly conference calls, and desktop sharing technology apps. In the last six months, I’ve gotten heavily involved in progressive local and regional politics in New York’s Congressional District 21, an area that spans roughly 15,115 square miles across 12 counties in rural northern NY. NY-21 is the size of a small European country, I learned, about the same size as Switzerland and a bit smaller…
German stickers and “Street Art Graphics” digital archive update
I spent a few months last winter and spring organizing hundreds (thousands?) of original, unused German political stickers that I’ve gathered since 2013, though some date back 10 or 20 years. Oliver Baudach at Hatch Kingdom, Berlin, who has been my most generous supporter, has given me well over 1,000 German stickers, and seeing his sticker museum convinced me to focus on collecting original, unused stickers whenever possible. I’ve also picked up stickers in Berlin at alternative bookstores, political rallies, May Day gatherings, infoshops, zine fests, and occasionally ebay.de. Several hundred German stickers also came in recently as gifts, with…
DPLA!
A sticker about Emma Goldman from my Street Art Graphics digital archive is featured today on the DPLA Twitter feed! Save Save
Ten new “stickerettes”!
I have acquired ten new I.W.W. stickerettes! They came from a packet with text on the cover that reads “Stickerettes – Silent Agitators – Fifteen Different Designs – Black And Red – Stick ’Um Up!” There is also an image of a black sab cat in a wooden shoe that was likely designed by or borrowed from Ralph Chaplin, whom I’ve written about before. Sorry for the poor screen shot of the envelope; it’s the best I could get. I can confirm the dates of these stickerettes, too. The I.W.W. headquarters were located at 1001 West Madison Street in Chicago,…
Dates Confirmed for Early I.W.W. Stickerettes
I can finally confirm dates of some of the earliest I.W.W. stickers in my collection. The August 31, 1918, edition of The Literary Digest ran an article called “Branding the I.W.W.” that features three stickers with the caption, “Typical I.W.W. Propaganda—Stickers Circulated in the Northwest.” Unfortunately, the article doesn’t say anything about the stickers themselves, but it describes the conviction of 100 I.W.W. members for treason soon after the beginning of World War I and the subsequent passage of the U.S. Espionage Act. The artist and poet Ralph Chaplin, whom I’ve written about in previous posts and for the People’s…