Stickers, aufkleber, street art, political posters, des affiches, ephemera
Sticker boards from Inspiring | Controversial | OBEY! Screen prints and stickers by Shepard Fairey at St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY), August 10 – September 3, 2022. Organized by Oliver Baudach, Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum, and Catherine Tedford, SLU Gallery Director, the exhibition features stickers from both of their collections.
A U.S. collector named Chuck Keppler contacted me recently in conjunction with the exhibition of screen prints and stickers by Shepard Fairey at St. Lawrence University, Inspiring | Controversial | OBEY! Chuck has compiled an amazing collection of Obey stickers and an Obey sticker database that numbers over 1,400 and is grouped by themes: OGs, icons, star icons, Obey/Giant, propaganda, circles, banners, commercial identity, etc. I asked for an interview, and here are Chuck’s responses. Can you describe how and when you got started with the Shepard Fairey Obey sticker database project? What piqued your interest? Do you collect the…
Oliver Baudach and I are organizing a new exhibition of silkscreen prints and stickers by Shepard Fairey for the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University. INSPIRING | CONTROVERSIAL | OBEY! Silkscreen prints and stickers by Shepard Fairey Organized by Oliver Baudach and Catherine Tedford August 10 – September 3, 2022 INSPIRING | CONTROVERSIAL | OBEY! presents work by one of the most well-known contemporary American street artists, Shepard Fairey. Drawn from St. Lawrence University’s permanent collection and private collections, the exhibition showcases work from over thirty years of the artist’s prolific career: from Fairey’s Andre the Giant…
Stickerkitty research blog Blog posts led to other publishing opportunities, etc. Digital archives Uncatalogued stickers Independent student research projects
The Slavers of New York sticker campaign and guerrilla education initiative is the work of three independent activists, Ada Reso, Maria Robles, and Elsa Eli Waithe, who in 2020 began posting stickers that looked like street signs altered to name New York City’s early slaveowners. Using census and manumission records, newspaper listings, and in-depth historical research, they have identified over 200 government officials, businessmen, and wealthy farmers who owned or traded enslaved people from the 1600s through the early 1800s. For the group’s first sticker, Elsa notes, “Nostrand Ave. is seven miles long in Brooklyn. And … what’s really egregious…
Someone who asked to remain anonymous kindly sent me a gift out of the blue last month of the May 1937 edition of the I.W.W. publication, The One Big Union Monthly. Featured on the back cover is an advertisement for stickers on sale for $2.00 per thousand. It still surprises me how prolific these stickerettes/stickers were in the early 1900s and how rare they are to find today. While I recognize most of the images, the two black and white cartoons featured here are completely new to me. These are some of the actual stickers. This was also on the…
Avram Finkelstein is an AIDS activist, artist, writer, and during the late 1980s, a co-founding member of the legendary Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives in New York City. In 1986, he and five others designed the iconic “Silence=Death” poster, which was soon shared with ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, in order to propel the image’s ubiquity through buttons, t-shirts, and stickers. He states, “[t]he AIDS activist community… actually created it, a community in search of its voice, one that went on to find it through the activation of its own social spaces. [The Silence=Death] image, as we…
I found a rash of Covid-19 conspiracy and anti-vaxx stickers last week in Potsdam, NY, stretching down two blocks on Market Street in front of many of the main stores and restaurants in town that were open during the busy holiday season. These stickers didn’t list the “Join the White Rose” disinformation group like the stickers that I wrote about from NYC last November, but the QR code on one of them linked to Open VAERS, a legitimate vaccine adverse reaction event reporting system run in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug…
I was able to go to NYC last weekend for the first time since January 2020, curious to see what the stickers would be like there after such a tumultuous couple of years in the United States, post-Trump and in the midst of a global pandemic. Saturday evening in midtown yielded few stickers at all, and surprisingly, almost nothing related to current affairs. Ho hum, snooze. Thanks, America. There were a few, though. On Sunday morning, I had seen some footage on Sandi Bachom’s and Ron Filipkowski’s Twitter feeds about a group of Proud Boys marching in the city the…
A chapter proposal that I submitted for a new anthology was recently accepted! Entitled Unframing the Visual: Visual Literacy Pedagogy in Academic Libraries and Information Spaces, the volume will be published as a companion piece to the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education (2016). The new collection features four sections: participating in a changing visual information landscape; perceiving visuals as communicating information; practicing visual discernment and criticality; and pursuing social justice through visual practice. My proposal was accepted for the section on pursuing social justice through visual practice. My chapter proposal Publicly-placed stickers…