Category: Berlin

“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…

German 103 writing assignment at SLU – fall 2018 – three examples

In the fall of 2018, St. Lawrence University students in Dr. Brook Henkel’s German 103 class again incorporated contemporary street art stickers from Germany for a writing assignment called “Politische Plakate und Aufkleber in Deutschland” (similar to what his students did in the fall of 2017). As before, I introduced the assignment by giving a brief talk with slides describing the ubiquitous sticker culture in Berlin, focusing on topics such as urban development, gentrification, police authority, surveillance, and identity politics. Students then came to the gallery where I work to look at three sets of original, unused stickers from my…

German stickers and “Street Art Graphics” digital archive update

I spent a few months last winter and spring organizing hundreds (thousands?) of original, unused German political stickers that I’ve gathered since 2013, though some date back 10 or 20 years. Oliver Baudach at Hatch Kingdom, Berlin, who has been my most generous supporter, has given me well over 1,000 German stickers, and seeing his sticker museum convinced me to focus on collecting original, unused stickers whenever possible. I’ve also picked up stickers in Berlin at alternative bookstores, political rallies, May Day gatherings, infoshops, zine fests, and occasionally ebay.de. Several hundred German stickers also came in recently as gifts, with…

876 framed stickers in “Paper Bullets” exhibition

German Spuckies 1980s: 18 U.S. Industrial Workers of the World Labor Union 1910s-1930s: 12 Misc. U.S. Politicians: 38 U.S. President Richard Nixon: 17 U.S. President George W. Bush: 18 U.S. World War II: 27 Arab Spring / Religion: 18 Ukraine / Maidan Protests: 12 Russia: 7 Falange Spanish Right-Wing Movement Anthem: 13 Mixed Themes: 45 U.S. War in Vietnam: 32 Race: 15 Immigration / Borders: 28 Environment: 42 Spain / Catalonian Separatist Movement: 51 German Political Parties: 67 Surveillance: 24 St. Pauli Football Club: 47 Die Linke German Political Party: 23 U.S. Gender 1980s: 43 Gender / Sexuality: 63 Capitalism…

“Paper Bullets: 100 Years of Political Stickers from Around the World” exhibition opens 13 Sept 2014

HATCH KINGDOM STICKER MUSEUM: PRESS RELEASE Paper Bullets: 100 Years of Political Stickers from around the World 13 September – 24 October 2014 Opening 13 September 2014 at 7:00 p.m. Publicly placed stickers with printed images and/or text have been used for decades as a form of political protest or to advocate political agendas. In the United States as early as the mid-1910s, for example, labor unions created the first “stickerettes,” or “silent agitators,” to oppose poor working conditions, intimidate bosses, and condemn capitalism. Later, during World War II, Allied and Axis countries dropped gummed “paper bullets” or “confetti soldiers”…

Mysterious directional stickers in Berlin

Yesterday while biking around Prenzlauer Berg and heading toward Wedding, I came across another rash of mysterious directional stickers on sign poles along Eberswalderstraße. This was after finding directional stickers last spring further south along Stresemannstraße and turning onto Zimmerstraße. The stickers are typically orange (or faded orange) with an arrow or arrows pointing straight ahead or turning left or right. A couple of times, there would be a blue triangle nearby pointing in the same direction, as if the streets are telling us something. I also found two orange arrows last year by Marianneplatz on Bethaniendamm. On all three…

Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben

One of my students at SLU, Carolyn Dellinger ’16, is starting to catalogue the Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben that I scanned over the summer (see Berlin-based sticker collections in previous post).  From 79 original raw scans, I came up with a total of 48 edited image files consisting of 16 complete stickers, 4 full sheets of “pre-Photoshop” color-separated stickers, and various individual color-separated stickers and overlays.  Carolyn also created seven image files that are diptychs or triptychs to show the color separations side by side.  The 54 image files in this set can be viewed on my Flickr…

Berlin-based sticker collections

I went to Berlin this past August to scan street art stickers from Infoladen Daneben and the Archiv der Jugendkulturen, contacts I made from my earlier trip to the city in May-June through a faculty research grant from the German Academic Exchange Service.  I must have spent ten hours during the course of three days scanning stickers…. The first set of ~30 rare, original stickers from Infoladen Daneben dated back to the early 1990s and were all printed in black and red on yellow paper, though they didn’t have any sort of glue or adhesive on the back. They’re actually…

Kreuzberg stickers – tagging geo-tagged images with words

For my new geo-tagging project, I’m trying to come up with a manageable number of consistent subject terms to describe what a sticker is about, i.e., what people in library and information science call creating an authority control or set of keywords (index terms).  One can go a little crazy in this endeavor, because there are so many comprehensive guides to refer to, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Getty Research Institute Art & Architecture Thesaurus, various ARTstor Subject Guides, and plain old common sense.  My goal is to narrow it down to about 20 keywords, and…