Stickerkitty

This is the first image I’ve ever seen of someone putting up stickers.  I found it in two issues of an I.W.W. newspaper called Solidarity published in Cleveland on September 9 and 16, 1917.  Stickerettes were advertised in Solidarity between at least June 24, 1916, and August 25, 1917, though I’ve seen a reference that they might have been advertised as early as November 20, 1915.  In 1916, one could buy stickerettes in packages – 110 per package cost 15 cents, or a box of 1,100 cost $1.00.

I’ve been trying to find photographs of stickerettes put up on buildings or other surfaces, too, but no luck yet.

Good news.  Guy Wicke is indeed the son of James T. Wicke.  Here is what Guy wrote in response to my email.

James T. Wicke is my father.  He died suddenly when I was 17, so obviously anything from his youth or political activism during the 60s-70s is a treasure beyond words for me.  The Pied Piper Lane address is my grandparents’ house (his childhood home).  I’ve never heard of the organization he was supposedly acting secretary of, but I wonder if it was a bit of tongue-in-cheek grandiosity.  He was a fan of that type of humor.  Or maybe it was a real group of activists in Wisconsin.

I’m going to send Guy the envelope that the stickers came in plus some spare stickers.  Who knows, maybe at some point we’ll get to know the background of these mysterious little paper thought bombs.  A friend of mine suggested that I check Google Scholar.  Pay it forward!

It’s been difficult finding information on the “night raiders” gummed labels and stickers that I posted about previously.  Google searches for the sender of the envelope—J S Kennard—and text on the stickers—FANSHEN, FANSHAN, Peace Products, night raiders, and Vietnam War—have yielded next to nothing.  I’ve only got one lead with FANSHEN, but need to do some more research before I can post anything.

Today, however, on ancestry.com, I found out that a James T. Wicke, formerly from Wausau, Wisconsin, died at age 51 on January 16, 1999, in Chicago.  Survivors included a son, Guy F. Wicke, who is now a Chicago-based comedian and works in marketing and public relations for the theater community.  His company is called Wicke International, and he writes on his Web site that the name was a joyous nod to his late father, James T. Wicke’s, sense of humor.  Dad ran two apartment buildings, and as a property manager created letterhead, cards, and pens to look like a global corporation, bringing a playful irony to his business.  I emailed Guy Wicke to see if he can help fill me in on the stickers.  Stay tuned!

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 Contemporary Street Art digital collection (catalogued) on the St. Lawrence University art gallery Web site and stickerkitty’s collection (uncatalogued) on Flickr continue to grow.  Thanks goes to Arline Wolfe at SLU for her cataloguing work in July.

I was also given the opportunity to contribute another exhibition review for the Journal of Curatorial Studies and wrote about the 7th Berlin Biennale, after viewing the show during my last trip to Germany in late April/early May 2012.  And my big project on the home front for the past two months has been to put together a mega-sticker exhibition that hopefully will travel to colleges and universities in the U.S. and elsewhere.  Organized thematically, the exhibition features several hundred stickers dating from 2004 to 2012, primarily from Germany, the U.S., and Canada.  Carole Mathey at SLU has begun to photograph the sticker boards that make up the show, and these will be used to publicize the exhibition.  More on that to follow.  In the meantime, check out this 1942 magazine cover from Collier’s.

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 in San Francisco in 1987, so I ordered a copy of my own from AbeBooks.  The catalogue identifies some of the artists who made these stickers (William Henkelman, for example, a sign painter by profession), though most of the creators weren’t artists at all (C.E. Setzer a.k.a. “CES” or “X13” was a construction worker on the Los Angeles aqueduct).  According to the catalogue, “The IWW pioneered the use of these little pieces of gummed paper.  Over the years countless different ones in a variety of sizes were produced in quantities that must total in the millions.  Old and new, they are still in use by the IWW as a simple, succinct method to spread ideas or just to generally raise the consciousness of the passerby.”

I get asked all the time if it’s right or wrong to take stickers off the streets, but seeing the stickerettes at NYU confirmed my dedication to building a sticker archive.  The stickers in my collection are just not available anymore, and some day, I’ll donate the collection to an institution for future research and scholarship.

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 of mine have been accepted for conferences later this year: Return to the Street at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Riot, Revolt, Revolution at the University of Brighton, UK.  This line really caught my eye in the call-for-papers for the Goldsmiths conference:

“Considering this ‘return’ (although it is questionable whether we every really left the street), how might a line be drawn between the type of discourse which pays lip service to banal, neoliberal fetishised notions of street as site and object of subversive cool – incorporating graffiti, fashion, skateboarding, hiphop – and a more critical and engaged examination of processes of exclusion, confrontation and violence which constitute the everyday reality of life on and in the street.”