Author: Catherine Tedford

“Voices of the People” exhibition at Woody Guthrie Center

On view through December 31, 2024, Voices of the People: 110+ Years of Political Stickers from the USA, features hundreds of stickers grouped by themes and dates. Click on an image and save it to a new tab to view stickers more closely. Curator’s statement by Catherine Tedford Publicly placed stickers with printed and hand-drawn images and text have been used for decades for creative expression and as an effective way to engage passersby. Often spotted at eye level or just beyond reach, stickers are hidden in plain sight, gracing every imaginable surface of the built environment—from street signs and…

Book contract for “Paper Bullets”!

I signed a book contract with PM Press last week to publish Paper Bullets: 110+ Years of Political Stickers from around the World! I’ll write the introduction and a few chapters, but I’ve invited several other notable contributors. My contact at PM Press also suggested Lincoln Cushing and Crimethinc. Ex-Workers’ Collective, both of whom I have followed for years. Here is the table of contents to date. Essays will each run 500-1,500 words, depending on the topic, etc.

Cataloguing George W. Bush stickers with ChatGPT 4o

I’m having so much fun using ChatGPT 4o to catalogue political stickers for the Street Art Graphics digital archive in Jstor. Today I catalogued 16 stickers about former President George W. Bush, and the results continue to impress me. Generative AI did an excellent job describing the contents and meaning of each sticker with this prompt: “There are three steps to this prompt. 1) First, in a 150-word summary for a college writing assignment, describe the contents and meaning of this political sticker about U.S. President George W. Bush. Please refer to specific online resources for your response. 2) Second,…

Eight new I.W.W. “silent agitators” + cataloguing with ChatGPT 4o

I recently acquired eight new I.W.W. “silent agitators” or “stickerettes,” bringing my collection up to 86 unique designs. That number is misleading, however, in that some designs are printed in different combinations of red and black ink on cream or red paper. Some designs have the addresses of I.W.W. headquarters listed on them, and some do not, which can help date the stickerettes. The address at 2422 North Halsted Street, Chicago, IL 60614 dated from April 1933 to February 1970, however, so most of the stickerettes date to that time period. The first stickerette below on red paper is one…

Featured contributor Kevin Howley on Richard Nixon sticker(s)

Kevin Howley (PhD Indiana University, 1998) is a writer and educator. His work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. His most recent book is Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination. [Editor’s Note: Kevin was one of the first people to contact me offering to contribute to the Paper Bullets exhibition and book. His original plan was to write about the Richard Nixon “Watergate: The Proof Increases Every day” sticker, but after seeing his final essay, I asked if I could include other Nixon stickers, too.] Watergate: The Proof Increases Everyday, V. Dinnerstein,…

Featured contributor Kevin Howley on George W. Bush sticker(s)

Kevin Howley (PhD Indiana University, 1998) is a writer and educator. His work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. His most recent book is Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination. [Editor’s Note: Kevin was one of the first people to contact me offering to contribute to the Paper Bullets exhibition and book. His original plan was to write about the “No Intel Inside” sticker of George W. Bush, but after seeing his final essay, I asked if I could include other Bush stickers, too. I am delighted with how this all turned…

ChatGPT4 to catalogue sociopolitical stickers?

I took a workshop yesterday at SLU where I work on generative AI and dove deep down the rabbit hole. I had gone into the workshop as a casual user of an early version of ChatGPT but came away really impressed with some possibilities for cataloguing sociopolitical stickers in the Street Art Graphics digital image collection. In the workshop, I used the library’s ChatGPT4 version to do a few test runs on stickers and other artworks in the SLU image collections, and here is what I learned. Prompt: I am a university professor. Describe the contents and meaning of this…

U.S. Political Campaign Stickers

Organized in chronological order with text from Wikipedia (accessed February 17, 2024). Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), commonly known as FDR, was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. He was a member of the Democratic Party and is the only U.S. president to have served more than two terms. His initial two terms were centered on combating the Great Depression, while his third and fourth saw him shift his focus to America’s involvement in World War II. Alfred Mossman Landon (September 9,…

New featured contributor to “Paper Bullets” exhibition + catalogue – Kevin Howley

In November 2023, I sent out a call for abstracts to CULTSTUD-L, a cultural studies listserv, inviting contributions to be included in the Paper Bullets: 100 Years of Political Stickers from Around the World exhibition and accompanying catalogue. “International researchers, scholars, writers, artists, activists, archivists, librarians, and others from diverse multicultural backgrounds are welcome to submit proposals. Essays will be presented in English, though translations can also be presented in the exhibition. Graduate students are welcome to submit. The Los Angeles Center for the Study of Political Graphics’ poster of the week provides some excellent examples of the sort of…