This semester, I asked one of my students, Rebecca Clayman ’17, to do research and write descriptions for a series of four Egyptian stickers from the Arab Spring protests for the Street Art Graphics digital archive (scroll down and click on “Egypt”). Since neither of us reads or speaks Arabic, Rebecca interviewed Gisele El Khoury, the director of St. Lawrence University’s Language Resource Center and Arabic professor. Dating from the beginning of the uprisings in 2011, the stickers are in bright bold colors: blue (“electoral process”), purple (“freedom”), green (“democracy”), and red (“social justice”). Gisele provided the Arabic script and…
“The People’s Archive” instructional notes
Below are the notes I sent to the Weaving the Streets & People’s Archives team members today, focusing on the People’s Archive component of the project. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting “The archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest: a job of collecting, sorting, preserving, making available, the records of the society. But I will stick…
“Forward to Recovery” sticker
I recently found a great political sticker about capitalism and the economy that looks very much like an I.W.W. stickerette due to its size, medium, and message. It states “Forward to Recovery – Increased Activity – Price Rise – Employment.” We see “Business” dressed as a fat cat in a fancy suit and pinstripe pants racing forward while being dragged down by the heavy anchor of “Low Wages.” The artist’s name is difficult to decipher; the signature looks like “Terry Costello,” but I can’t find anything similar online or in any of my I.W.W.-related books and articles. The reason I…
Nelson Mandela and anti-apartheid stickers
Two stickers in my collection focus on Nelson Mandela and anti-apartheid in South Africa. The first states “Stop Apartheid, Boycott Shell – Owen Bieber, UAW President and National CAP Chairman,” and the date 1985 is penciled on the back. Owen Bieber was then President of the American United Auto Workers Union and a strong Mandela supporter. In 1984, Bieber was even arrested in an anti-apartheid demonstration in DC. An article entitled “Campaign to Boycott Shell” in the United States Anti-Apartheid Newsletter (Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring 1986) describes Bieber’s role in the campaign and the call for “Shell and other…
Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive – December 2013
Our first Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive press release. Introduction Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive (WSPA) is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary collaborative project that offers St. Lawrence University students, alumni, and others the opportunity to be part of a dynamic, global, investigative blog and a digital archive that document the creative range of ways in which ordinary people make use of public space to express themselves. The goal is to bring together examples from a wide range of cultures and experiences so that people can build bridges, explore lines of solidarity and difference, and learn from the experiences of…
Stickerkitty Can Haz Metadata
I am learning how to use ContentDM (CDM), the digital image management software that the SLU gallery uses to catalogue its internal permanent collection database and other published collections. It’s a program that’s geared more toward library special collections and historical societies, and so it’s not that great in terms of presenting large works of art on a monitor or wall screen. (By contrast, the gallery’s Canadian Inuit art collection is presented in Drupal; the images appear almost full screen and are much clearer.) What’s cool about learning CDM, however, is that I can now add misc. stickers here and…
FC St. Pauli stickers #2
I did a little more research and polished my previous blog post on St. Pauli stickers for two reasons: 1.) I needed a shorter, condensed version without links to use in the Street Art Graphics digital archive, and 2.) I will use this version in the traveling exhibition, Re-Writing the Streets: The International Language of Stickers. I can also use this exercise to show students the differences and similarities among a blog post, metadata for a digital archive, and an exhibition text panel. ————————————– Hamburg, the German port city home to the St. Pauli football club (Fußball St. Pauli or…
St. Pauli football club stickers
Hamburg, the German port city that is home to the St. Pauli Football Club, hosts a sports team well known for its outspoken anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic politics and its staunchly progressive activism. Founded in 1910, the Club is located in the working-class district along the docks near the Reeperbahn red-light district. For the past 30 years, the team has maintained a certain cult following across Europe, initially attracting radicals, squatters, dockers, and prostitutes in the 1980s, and later, anarchists, punks, bikers, anti-fascists, and other politicized groups. You can read more at When Punk and Football Collide, Punks, prostitutes…
Solicitud de pegatinas españolas / Request for Spanish stickers
Me llamo Catherine Tedford, y soy la directora de la Galería de Arte en St. Lawrence University (SLU), localizada en el norte del estado de New York en los Estados Unidos. En estos momentos Marina Llorente, profesora de lengua y literatura española en SLU y yo misma estamos trabajando en un proyecto sobre pegatinas como arte de la calle o callejero y otros materiales impresos como carteles, etc. En una de las clases de Marina titulada “Literatura, cine y cultura de masas en la España contemporánea,” los estudiantes tienen que hacer un trabajo de investigación en el cual estudian las…
Vote Republican 1926 sticker
I recently came across a U.S. political sticker from Iowa in 1926 that is one of the first of its kind, from what I’ve seen, that isn’t an I.W.W. Wobbly labor union stickerette (see previous posts on I.W.W. stickerettes). What’s interesting, however, is how Ralph Chaplin, a 1910s-era I.W.W. key artist/agitator, talked about printed labels on various fruit and vegetable cartons that helped inspire him to create political stickers. I’ll dig up those references for a later post.