Category: the faith of graffiti

Possible sticker show in NYC!

There is a chance I might be able to show stickers from my collection at an artists’ collective gallery in NYC next February-March 2013!  I can’t say where exactly yet until the artists in the group confirm the idea, but the director of the gallery is very positive.  I met with him on Wednesday, and we spent over an hour talking through different ways to approach the project in ways that would be a good fit with the well-known street artists in the collective (inc. Faust and others).  Brian, the director, suggested we show individual stickers on the wall rather…

Another busy summer with stickers

Various sticker activities have kept me busy this summer, making it difficult to find time to write blog posts.  That, plus my home laptop died, so I don’t have the chance to write in the evenings.  Basically, though, all is very good.  I gave a paper presentation at the Return to the Street conference at Goldsmiths University of London in June, and I’m heading to the University of Brighton in early September to present at their 7th Annual International Interdisciplinary conference entitled Riot Revolt Revolution.  From over 70 speakers, I am one of seven from the U.S.  In addition, the…

Stickerettes at NYU Tamiment Library

The Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU’s Tamiment Library contains close to 30 original stickerettes, i.e., the “silent agitators” I wrote about in my previous post.  I went down to NYC last week to see them in person and had no idea there would be so many different designs.  From what I’ve been reading, some were used as early as the 1910s, while a later one referred to the fighting in Viet Nam (sic).  I also saw a catalogue for an exhibition entitled “Wobbly” 80 Years of Rebel Art that was held at the Labor Archives and Research Center…

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?

B2B x 2

B2B = back to blogging! It’s been over a month since my last blog post.  I’ve been a little overwhelmed lately with the flood of information that is available online to the point where I can’t write.  I leave tabs open in Firefox to remember all the cool stuff out there: a new online anarchist archive at the University of Victoria in BC, Canada; a book called OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture; Death and Taxes’s Occupy Wall Street Systematically Ignored by Mainstream Media; AP’s Wall Street protester’s dress as zombies in NYC; Occupy Boston at Dewey Street’s downloadable…

Dear diary. August 8, 2011.

The Los Angeles MOCA exhibition Art in the Streets closed today.  If I were rich, I’d have flown over to see it before now.  The show was supposed to travel east to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, but the BMA cancelled it due to “budget reductions.”  [Side note: their current exhibition on Vishnu looks pretty interesting, tho.]  Not sure if Art in the Streets will travel at all after LA, but I sure hope so. The director emeritus (not sure what you call it) of Traditional Arts of Upstate New York, Varick Chittendon, is good friends with Martha Cooper, or…

By good fortune

By good fortune or great coincidence, I met someone in the Inuit art world who was actively involved in German street art in the late 1980s and early 1990s – working with others in stencils, stickers, and posters.  He contributed to the publication of “hoch die kampf dem: 20 Jahre Plakata autonomer Bewegungen” (“20 years of autonomous movements posters”) and “vorwärts bis zum nieder mit: 30 Jahre Plakate unkontrollierter Bewegungen,” which on Amazon translates awkwardly to “forward to the down with: 30 years of posters of uncontrolled movements.”  When I put “with others” above, he told me that individuals rarely…

6th International Conference on the Arts in Society 2011

I give my paper tomorrow at 3:55 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, where in the spring of 2003 I sat in the plaza at the entrance of the building and began my sticker journey.  I didn’t know then it would become a journey!  I only realized it today when I arrived at the conference that I’ve come full circle back to same spot.  A similar crystal clear blue sky.  So much has happened between then and now.

Look out, little aufklebers

Look out, little aufklebers.  Your days are numbered.  Stickerkitty is heading to Berlin tomorrow.  Best news I had today was that Hatch Kingdom, the world’s only sticker museum, is re-opening in a new HK HQ this Saturday in Mitte.  This after being closed since last November.  Purrfect timing! The other good news is that today is Pete Seeger’s 92nd birthday.  Very nice.  I think Pete would like stickers.