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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…

German 103 Writing Assignment – SLU Fall 2019

In the fall of 2019, St. Lawrence University students in Dr. Brook Henkel’s German 103 class incorporated contemporary political stickers from Germany for a writing assignment, similar to what his students did in 2017 and in 2018. (Click on those two links for the actual writing assignment, preparatory readings, etc.). The work of two students, Stefan Dragićević ’22 and Sophie Lehmann ’20, is featured below. Thanks also to Brendan Reilly ’20 for the German-to-English translations. Note: the right-wing NPD and Freiheit/Islamismus stickers pictured below were donated to me in 2017 by Irmela Mensah-Schramm, a 74-year old Berlin-based woman who has…

Sticker making workshop with St. Lawrence University First-Year Program class

Two SLU professors, Steve Barnard (Sociology) and John Collins (Global Studies), brought their First-Year Program class to the gallery in November 2019 for a hands-on sticker making workshop. The name of the course is “Question Everything: The Art of Information Activism,” and the syllabus states: This course is for students who want to be activists for change and activists for truth. Activists are people who seek to transform dominant social structures through collective action that often stretches beyond the official political system. Activists start by asking deep questions about the world. Why is there so much injustice? How can we…

“Paper Bullets” review in Berliner Zeitung

Kleben und leben lassen Eine Ausstellung in Mitte widmet sich der einhundertjährigen Geschichte von politischen Stickern. Eine Reise von Montreal über New York an die Spree Von Paul Linke Es gibt ein paar Orte in Berlin, die als Hall of Fame der alternativen Stickerszene bezeichnet werden: die Fassade des Kino Intimes und das gesamte RAW-Gelände in Friedrichshain, in Mitte das Haus Schwarzenberg und die S-Bahnbögen am Hackeschen Markt Richtung Alexanderplatz. Wer dort klebt, lebt in einer tendenziell linken Welt, im Dauerwiderstand gegen Kriegstreiber, Spekulanten, Rassisten, Nazis. Im Gegensatz zum Sprühen ist Kleben keine Sachbeschädigung, sondern eine Ordnungswidrigkeit. Die Wurzeln der…

“Paper Bullets – the expanded version” at Neurotitan Gallery in Berlin, Germany

In the summer of 2019, I was given the opportunity to present an expanded version of my Paper Bullets exhibition at the acclaimed Neurotitan Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Oliver Baudach, the director of Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum, was the driving force that made the project possible. It was an enormous undertaking, in that for the first time I drew from my entire collection of thousands of new, unused, historical and contemporary political stickers from around the world. Neurotitan is a non-commercial, alternative art gallery that features urban art. Housed in the Haus Schwarzenberg in Mitte, the gallery dates back to…

“SHE SLAPS: Street Art Stickers by Women Artists from Around the World” traveling exhibition at SLU

The exhibition SHE SLAPS: Street Art Stickers by Women Artists from Around the World closes at St. Lawrence University this week. Here is the co-curator’s statement I wrote about the project: SHE SLAPS features 536 street art stickers by 85 contemporary women artists from 20 countries around the world. Drawn from the private collection of Oliver Baudach, founder and director of Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum in Berlin, Germany, the exhibition includes stickers individually drawn, painted, and/or printed by the artists, as well as silkscreen, offset, and digital designs that were printed in larger runs through commercial services. In the spring…

Symbols of Hate

I found another alt-right sticker in Potsdam, NY, last week. This one was a heavy vinyl sticker compared to the lightweight paper “Pepe the Frog” white power stickers I found last January along the same block. In a December 30, 2016, Vox article called “The 2016 culture war, as illustrated by the alt-right,” author Aja Romano writes that the figure on this sticker represents: “…the head of the Egyptian frog-god Kek superimposed over an image of his counterpart, the Egyptian snake god Kauket, in a seal inscribed with the Latin phrase ‘satis mentibus obvia,’ or, ‘resist closed minds.’ It’s complicated,…