Curated by Oliver Baudach, Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum (Berlin, Germany) and Catherine Tedford, St. Lawrence University Art Gallery (Canton, NY, USA) Sticker boards from the exhibition and stickers for display case. A curators’ statement and exhibition contents are listed below. SHE SLAPS 2.0! features close to 600 street art stickers by 118 contemporary women artists from 22 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 that were individually drawn, painted, and/or printed by the artists, as well as silkscreen, offset, and digital…
A U.S. collector named Chuck Keppler contacted me recently in conjunction with the exhibition of screen prints and stickers by Shepard Fairey at St. Lawrence University, Inspiring | Controversial | OBEY! Chuck has compiled an amazing collection of Obey stickers and an Obey sticker database that numbers over 1,400 and is grouped by themes: OGs, icons, star icons, Obey/Giant, propaganda, circles, banners, commercial identity, etc. I asked for an interview, and here are Chuck’s responses. Can you describe how and when you got started with the Shepard Fairey Obey sticker database project? What piqued your interest? Do you collect the…
Exhibition and Book Proposal Catherine Tedford Hidden in plain sight, publicly placed stickers with printed images and/or text have been used for decades as a form of sociopolitical protest or to advocate sociopolitical agendas. In the United States, for example, as early as the 1910s, labor unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World 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” from the sky as a form of psychological warfare to demoralize both…
Stickerkitty research blog Blog posts led to other publishing opportunities, etc. Digital archives Uncatalogued stickers Independent student research projects
[Note: a shorter version of this essay first appeared as “Silent Agitators: Early Stickerettes from the Industrial Workers of the World” in Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture. Volume 6 (February 2018), PM Press. See also the timeline I put together of early advertisements and newspapers articles about I.W.W. stickerettes.] Founded in Chicago in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W. or “Wobblies”) fought for economic justice for the working class using many tactics, including the widespread use of cartoons, slogans, leaflets, poetry, and songs that appealed to uneducated, immigrant, and itinerant workers. As early as…
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…
History of the collection and museum Oliver Baudach is the founder and director of Hatch Kingdom (Berlin, Germany), the world’s first and only museum devoted to stickers. He first started collecting stickers in the early 1980s as a young teenager in a small village called Speyer in southern Germany. He clearly remembers buying a wallet at the time from Skull Skates and finding “one of the best skull stickers [he had] ever seen.” He subsequently started collecting stickers related to skateboard culture, streetwear, and punk rock bands like the Misfits and the Ramones. In the 1990s, after graduating from high…
Project History Initiated in 2015 by the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery and the Libraries and Instructional Technology (LIT) division at St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY), the People’s History Archive features selected street art stickers, posters, and ephemera from around the world dating from the 1910s to present day. Contributors include undergraduate students, young alumni, and faculty who create mini-online interpretive exhibits using items from a Street Art Graphics digital archive and/or from items contributors have selected themselves through off-campus research projects. Items can also be viewed on an interactive timeline and map. The original Street Art Graphics digital archive…
In 2008, Sticker Robot commissioned ten artists to create stickers for the Obama election; the artists included Shepard Fairey, Munk One, Zoltron, Sam Flores, Morning Breath, El Mac (whose sticker is pictured above), Ron English, Felix Jackson, Jr.,Dustin Parker, and David Choe. I haven’t found too much information about the series yet, but there was an Obama art discussion group on Flickr that featured #9 and #10, and a Web site called Expresso Beans that occasionally shows packets of them for sale. At the time, Sticker Robot wrote this about the packets: In a final effort to show our support…