Update January 2023

The Street Art Graphics digital archive, originally constructed in 2015 in a platform called Shared Shelf Commons, is now being catalogued in a new platform called Jstor Forum. For now, digital collections created in Jstor Forum can be published in Artstor, Jstor, and elsewhere, though there is talk that Artstor will be discontinued in the near future (which is too bad, because I’ve always thought Artstor had the highest quality image and metadata display).

The display in Jstor is definitely improving, but the metadata fields in Jstor are geared more towards text-based original materials than visuals, which means that certain metadata fields don’t show up or don’t show up correctly. We’ll see if/how that improves over time.

The Street Art Graphics digital archive now numbers over 4,300 items, thanks to an initial, multi-year, start-up grant from the US Council of Independent Colleges (2015-2018) and a subsequent collection development grant to catalogue stickers by female artists from the recent SHE SLAPS exhibition (2018-2019). The archive now also includes a more complete rights statement located on each item page:

“Items in the digital archive are made available for education and research. Viewpoints expressed in certain items do not necessarily represent viewpoints of the archive’s curator, contributors, or any others related to the project. This item may be protected by copyright. You are free to use the item in any way that is permitted by copyright and rights legislation that applies to your use. For more information, see http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/. See also http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/copyright/.” This statement will be especially important if/when I start cataloguing right-wing “white power” stickers.

Update March 2016

Plugged Part A – NEW! People’s History Archive

  • Initiated in 2015 by the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery and the Libraries and Instructional Technologies 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 the Street Art Graphics digital archive and/or items contributors have selected themselves from off-campus research projects. Items can also be viewed on an interactive timeline and map. The People’s History Archive also represents a collaboration between the Street Art Graphics digital archive and the Weave, an independent news media project created in 2006 and headquartered in the Global Studies department. Catherine Tedford, gallery director, and John Collins, professor of Global Studies, received a four-year mini-grant from an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities grant to the University entitled “Crossing Boundaries: Re-envisioning the Humanities in the 21st Century.”

Plugged Part B – NEW! Street Art Graphics (published in Shared Shelf Commons)

  • A digital archive of over 1,600 stickers and other street-based ephemera from around the world.  In 2015, the U.S. Council of Independent Colleges selected the archive as one of 43 projects across the country to be included in Shared Shelf Commons. St. Lawrence University received a four-year grant to build the archive and enhance its use in teaching and scholarship.

Plugged Part C – Street Art Graphics (published in ContentDM)

  • Initiated in 2004, the archive has grown to 2,726 street art stickers and other street-based ephemera from Canada, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Russia, Spain, Ukraine, the United States, and other countries around the world.  Many thanks to St. Lawrence University’s metadata guru, Arline Wolfe, at the library, and Carole Mathey at the art gallery for their help with the sticker collection and the two digital archives.

Plugged Part D – Stickerkitty’s Collection on Flickr (uncatalogued)

  • Of the over 12,000 stickers in the collection, approximately 10,400 stickers have been scanned and added to Flickr.  Grouped by date and location, they can be viewed individually or by clicking on Albums.

Plugged Part E – Stickerkitty’s Map on Flickr (subject tags in progress)

Update June 2012

The sticker collection now numbers over 7,000 – with over 5,200 individual stickers scanned and archived on the SLU server, my office laptop, and a new Flickr site called stickerkitty’s collection (uncataloged).  There are currently 46 sets of stickers from trips to Berlin, NYC, Munich, Hamburg, Montreal, and other cities in North America and Europe.  I’ve also starting adding U.S. stickers from the 19760s and ’70s, as well as a rare collection of Catalonian stickers from the same time period.

You can also still view the cataloged collection of ~500 stickers on the SLU Art Gallery Web site.

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Update March 2011

A new contemporary street art database is underway with a professional cataloger, Arline Wolfe, on board.  She has been organizing image files and assigning consistent terms for artist, title, date, location, and most importantly, subject and description fields (see post from March 8, 2011).   The new database will include stickers from my most recent trip to Berlin and Munich in June 2010.

I’m still going to keep the other database online (link below), but the cataloging for that collection is spotty.

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Stickerkitty Has A Posse is a database of 1,950+ original stickers and a few dozen street art photographs.  A good number of sticker image files in the database still need to be cataloged.

During my most recent trip to Berlin in November 2009, during the week before the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I collected over 350 stickers, all of which will be added to the database in 2010.

Posse ninjas scanned another ~1,200 stickers during the summer of 2009; these records will be uploaded into the database and cataloged as time allows.

On top of that, several hundred additional stickers collected in the past five years still need to be archived, scanned, and cataloged.

It’s going to be a busy year life.

Digital collection SUBJECT HEADINGS for the Posse as of January 12, 2010:

advertising
anarchy
animal rights
antifa (German anti-fascism)
authority
capitalism
clothing
commerce
conspiracy
entertainment
environment
ethnicity
fascism
fear
gender relations
gentrification
globalization
humor
identity
identity – cultural
identity – national
media
music
politics
politics -- European Union
politics -- political conflict
politics -- US elections
politics -- war
power
privacy
propaganda
punk culture
race relations
religion
resistance
skateboard culture
sports
surveillance
technology
terrorism

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6 Comments

  1. Stickerkitty! got round to finding you on wwws at last. MyTarpit and I are coming over in the fall for some graffiti installations. Have to do something in your neck of the woods.
    And you might like MyTarPit’s new project. 200 Words. You can swap your handwritten words for his handpainted canvases…..
    http://www.mytarpit.com/200words
    rockpool candy

  2. Hey Stickerkitty.
    Yeah, we’re up for lectures/workshops. Would love to! We’ve got a tour in the planning starting in Oct in Chicago and ending in Florida in Jan. Let’s fit in dates with you guys, too.

    Email me through my site (all the ws)rockpoolcandy(dot)com. Click the button under my picture.

    Also, MyTarPit has a big exhibition here in Northern Ireland called ‘Underground overground’ opening on 6th of July. He’s graffiting walls and fences etc in the Ulster Hall and featuring stickers from loads of other artists. He’d love you to contribute with some of your stickers. (He’s also asked me to ask you especially for some more of the Priority Mail Labels if that’s poss.) You can email him direct through his site, too. (all the ws)mytarpit(dot)com

    Speak soon,
    rockpool candy

  3. Also, MyTarPit has a big exhibition here in Northern Ireland called ‘Underground overground’ opening on 6th of July. He’s graffiting walls and fences etc in the Ulster Hall and featuring stickers from loads of other artists. He’d love you to contribute with some of your stickers. (He’s also asked me to ask you especially for some more of the Priority Mail Labels if that’s poss.) You can email him direct through his site, too. (all the ws)mytarpit(dot)com+1
    +1