Category: all

Thor Steinar storefront in Friedrichsain and other protests

I took an early evening bike ride on Thursday, this time southeast from Greifswalder Strasse along Danzinger, which functions sort of like a ring road.  Danzinger turns into Petersburger Strasse, and as I approached Frankfurter Tor, I noticed a couple of good-looking stickers on an electrical pole, but as I got closer, I could see they were covered with paint.  Looking around further, I saw a storefront with shattered and taped up windows, and in fact, the entire building façade and sidewalk below had been splashed with several layers of pink paint. The shop was a Thor Steinar outlet, a…

Walpurgisnacht, or Walpurgis Night

Arrived in Berlin safe and sound yesterday morning, slept, and spent a couple of hours in the late afternoon walking a loop around Prenzlauer Berg from Greifswalder Strasse up to Danzinger Strasse and back on Stredzkistrasse.  I collected about 60 stickers in just a few hours, mostly political and a bunch announcing May Day-related strikes and demonstrations.  The one below is for an anti-capitalist strike in Wedding on Walpurgisnacht, or Walpurgis Night, with several events listed here.  Walpurgis Night is a traditional pagan spring festival celebrated April 30 or May 1, six months from Halloween, in which huge bonfires are…

STUCK UP review and two upcoming conferences

Another great outcome from CAA 2012:  I was invited to write a review of DB Burkeman’s traveling exhibition STUCK UP: A Selected History of Alternative & Pop Culture Told Through Stickers for the Journal of Curatorial Studies.  The show premiered at the SCOPE Art Fair in Miami last December and has traveled to Chicago and the 323East Gallery in Detroit.  You can catch it next at the New Bedford Art Museum and UGLY Gallery, Rhode Island (opening April 21, 2012). The journal deadline was tight, which is why I haven’t been blogging lately.  That, plus I learned that two papers…

Rare S.D.S. stickers

After hearing my talk at the CAA conference last week, Fred Lonidier from UCSD sent me four S.D.S. stickers that date back to the late 1960s/early 1970s.  I’ve never seen anything like these before, but found that Kent State in Ohio has a box of S.D.S material in their Special Collections Library described as: Here is an anti-Vietnam War sticker that Fred sent. And this sticker with a quote by Bertolt Brecht seems fitting for the Occupy movement forty years later, doesn’t it?

T/err/ouristen raus!

Tourism and gentrification are on the rise in Berlin, with an estimated 20 million overnight stays in 2010 reaping nine billion Euros.  And the city hopes to grow that number to 30 million, according to the German newspaper, der Spiegel, which will make Berlin the third largest destination point in Europe after London and Paris.  In the past ten years, entire districts, especially in the former east Berlin, have been re-defined on the one hand by an influx of foreign tourists, yuppies, and backpackers and a growing number of cheap hostels, open-air bars, restaurants, and clubs, and on the other…

STUCK UP and “They Live”

My “I’m Sorry (George W. Bush)” sticker is included in an exhibition entitled STUCK UP, A Selected History of Alternative & Pop Culture Told Through Stickers, which opens on January 20, 2012, and runs through March 3, 2012, at Maxwell Collette Gallery in Chicago.  The exhibition, which was curated by DB Burkeman, draws from his extensive personal collection and: “provides an unparalleled opportunity to explore the expanding role that stickers have played in popular culture over the past four decades.  ‘STUCK UP…’ features stickers from Street Art legends (Banksy, Barry McGee, Shepard Fairey, Space Invader, KAWS), and internationally lauded contemporary…

Montréal exhibition

A few people have asked to see installation shots of DE VIGUEUR et DE VERVE at Fresh Paint Gallery in Montréal (hello, Oli and Nada!), so here is a set of photographs on my Flickr site and a nice collection from flippybits.  The gallery space there is gorgeous with big windows on three floors facing out on the streets.  So much daylight made it difficult to get good photographs, but I’m going back up on Saturday and will try to take some better ones.  Don’t you like my OWS-style signage?! I am also stickerkitty.com now having paid the Man for…

Happy new year 2012!

All roads have been leading me to read up on the Situationists in relation to theorizing stickers, including a new book I picked up last week at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge entitled Viva La Revolucion: A Dialogue with the Urban Landscape.  (Waugh, I’m not a theorist….) However, in the spirit of the new year, here’s a picture of me at the Pictoplasma character design art conference in Berlin in 2009!  Happy happy!

Ho, ho, ho!

As far as I know, there are only two Christmas stickers in my collection, and as to be expected, both are stickin’ it to the Man – the coppers (Berlin 2010) and Wal-Mart et al (NYC 2006).  LOL. The Boycott Christmas sticker might still be available here, though the Web site dates to 2000. I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks creating a new Flickr database called stickerkitty’s collection.  It’s more for use as a back-up than anything else, though now I can show people stickers from anywhere.  All of my 5,000+ sticker image files are stored on one…