Re-Writing the Streets: The International Language of Stickers A Traveling Exhibition Curated by Catherine Tedford and Oliver Baudach Overview In the last twenty years, street art has evolved dramatically from the graffiti that peppered subway stations, back alleys, and train yards, and was typically seen as vandalism. Today, new forms of visual communication are created in public spaces, often attracting viewers in more contemplative and/or interactive ways. Street art stickers, or simply “stickers,” have emerged as a vehicle for self-expression and an effective way to engage passersby. Stickers may be used to “tag” or claim a space and make it…
Since 2010, I have had the good fortune to collaborate with Oliver Baudach on four traveling sticker exhibitions. Oli is the founder and director of Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum in Berlin, Germany, the world’s first and only of its kind. Our international collections complement each other well in that his collection of over 30,000 stickers focuses on urban art/artists and street and skateboard culture, while my collection of over 18,000 stickers focuses on political stickers. Digital image files of our scanned stickers from two exhibitions are also sorted by themes, countries, and dates. Scroll down to see examples from Paper…
Stickerkitty research blog Blog posts led to other publishing opportunities, etc. Digital archives Uncatalogued stickers Independent student research projects
Two SLU professors, Steve Barnard (Sociology) and John Collins (Global Studies), brought their First-Year Program class to the gallery in November 2019 for a hands-on sticker making workshop. The name of the course is “Question Everything: The Art of Information Activism,” and the syllabus states: This course is for students who want to be activists for change and activists for truth. Activists are people who seek to transform dominant social structures through collective action that often stretches beyond the official political system. Activists start by asking deep questions about the world. Why is there so much injustice? How can we…
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…
Another page for the Re-Writing the Streets zine beautifully designed by Amy Hauber.
My friend Amy Hauber at SLU is helping with the graphic design for the Re-Writing the Streets exhibition zine. Here is what she did with the photograph from my previous post for the page spread on U.S. historical political stickers. We hope to send this puppy to the printer in the upcoming week!
I’m making a sticker zine for the Re-Writing the Streets traveling exhibition. I used to make a lot of zines with students when I taught bookbinding and a course on artists’ books. Back then we used old-fashioned copier machines, scissors, and glue sticks. Now I’m using Photoshop software and trying to learn a little InDesign, and it’s a lot more complicated. It will look good when it’s done, though. A friend of mine at school is helping with graphic design, too, thankfully. Of the over 800 stickers in the show, I’ve selected about 250 for a 28-page zine. I’ll probably…
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…
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