“provides an unparalleled opportunity to explore the expanding role that stickers have played in popular culture over the past four decades.  ‘STUCK UP…’ features stickers from Street Art legends (Banksy, Barry McGee, Shepard Fairey, Space Invader, KAWS), and internationally lauded contemporary artists (Andy Warhol, Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Tom Sachs) shown side by side with anonymous stickers peeled from the streets of NYC.”

The exhibition opened at the Scope Art Fair during Art Basel | Miami Beach in December 2011.  For this project, Burkeman created seven large themed panels, sort of like what I’ve done in sticker exhibitions in the past, but his stickers look like they’re floating in air, which is pretty sweet.  My sticker is on the lower left of this panel, second row up from the bottom:

Aside from this little not-so-humblebrag is that I watched John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live yesterday on the recommendation of friends at Peace Paper.  With a more contemporary cast, the film could have been made in the last couple of years with its themes of corporate greed, capitalist consumption, police surveillance, and the role of advertising and the media in controlling human thought.  When the main character in the movie puts on a special pair of sunglasses, he is able to see the truth that alien ghouls run the banks and government and that billboards, magazines, and material objects contain subliminal messages to “OBEY,” “CONSUME,” and “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.”

Shepard Fairey is said to have been influenced by the film for his OBEY Giant propaganda campaign.

I am also stickerkitty.com now having paid the Man for my own domain name.  What a crazy concept….

However, in the spirit of the new year, here’s a picture of me at the Pictoplasma character design art conference in Berlin in 2009!  Happy happy!

The Boycott Christmas sticker might still be available here, though the Web site dates to 2000.

I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks creating a new Flickr database called stickerkitty’s collection.  It’s more for use as a back-up than anything else, though now I can show people stickers from anywhere.  All of my 5,000+ sticker image files are stored on one of the SLU servers – the NCAT “scratch” drive.  I’m also importing the files onto my laptop via iPhoto.  It’s weird thinking about the long-term archival storage of image files, but for now I’m using a server, a hard drive, and the cloud.

International Sticker Exhibition

DE VIGUEUR et DE VERVE!

Fresh Paint – Peint Frais

Edition III

Hatch Kingdom, the only sticker museum in the world, has collaborated with Catherine Tedford, a.k.a. Stickerkitty, to present an exhibition of street art stickers and photographs from Berlin and New York City, with additional pieces from cities across Europe and North America.  As part of a larger exhibition entitled Edition III, which includes work by contemporary muralists, graffiti artists, photographers, and others, the international sticker exhibition will be on display at Fresh Paint Gallery, Montréal, Québec, from December 2, 2011, through January 29, 2011.

Founded by Oliver Baudach in 2008, Hatch Kingdom began as a small gallery space in Berlin’s alternative Friedrichsain district to serve as a platform for stickers, sticker artists, skateboard fans, and collectors.  An expanded Hatch HQ is now located in central Mitte, with two gallery spaces devoted to Oli’s ever-growing sticker collection, now numbering well over 25,000 stickers, and one gallery for rotating exhibitions by young urban street artists.

Catherine directs St. Lawrence University’s art gallery in Canton, NY, and has been actively collecting stickers since 2003, having now collected over 6,000 original stickers by hand, primarily from Berlin and NYC, with stickers also from Hamburg, Munich, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cambridge (MA), Ottawa, Toronto, Amsterdam, Budapest, and other cities in western and central Europe.  Part of the collection is being digitized and can be found at SLU’s gallery Web site.  Catherine has presented papers at academic conferences for the College Art Association, the Visual Resources Association, and the International Arts in Society; in 2012, she will present a paper entitled “WTF.  It’s Only a Sticker” at the annual CAA conference in Los Angeles.  Check her Stickerkitty blog for more information.

The exhibition at Fresh Paint also includes six original drawings and collages from “Oversized and Underpriced,” a project initiated by Oliver Baudach in which artworks on oversized sticker printouts are sold at low prices with proceeds to benefit Skateistan, a skateboarding school in Kabul, Afghanistan, for young boys and girls.

In addition to art, music, and tagging stickers, political stickers in the exhibition from Germany and the U.S. focus on anti-authority, anti-capitalism, post-9/11 surveillance measures, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 US Presidential election, the environment, oil consumption, and the economy.  Examples of these were included in a recent gallery exhibition at St. Lawrence in 2010, which was based in part on a summer research grant from SLU’s Center for International and Intercultural Studies in which three students and an alumnus traveled to Berlin and Munich to study street art.

Later that week, I started to do some serious research on transporting items across the border.  I’ve rented a U-Haul and plan to bring 52 framed pieces to Montréal next Tuesday.  One Web site suggested I register for an importer/exporter account, which I did by calling a 1-800 number.  I asked what the importer/exporter account registration was good for, and the woman on the line said it was a post-9/11 homeland security measure.  It seemed kind of odd that I could apply for this thing without showing any ID or seeing anyone in person, but I gave my name and address and for what it’s worth now have an account.

Today I went back to the customs offices at Ogdensburg, NY, and Prescott, ON, to double-check that I have everything in order to transport next week.  It seems one can fill out a simple US form, and with my account number, cross over to Canada and take the chance that everything will go smoothly with CBSA.

Or, one can go through an international customs broker, which is what I have decided to do.  I’m working with Strader-Ferris, and the CA customs agent today assured this was the best way to handle the transport.  I don’t want anything to go wrong with this precious cargo!

The sticker exhibition at Fresh Paint is part of a much larger show they’re presenting called Arab Winter, “a multi-media, multi-disciplinary event with musicians, painters, calligraphists, graffiti artists and short films.”  I have about 800 square feet on the second floor of a gorgeous building at 180 St. Catherine Street East.  I plan to line the walls with scrap chain link fence gates that I scrounged behind SLU’s Physical Plant and will hang the framed artworks on the gates to give the show a sort of urban gritty feel.  Carole, Arline, Ray, and I will try to get it all done on Wednesday.  NP!  I hope!  Pics to follow….

On the other hand, the United States has spent over $803 billion on the war in Iraq since it began on March 20, 2003.  Go to costofwar.com and watch the numbers spin.  October 7, 2011 marked the ten-year anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, and there, the US has spent $474 billion.  Costofwar.com is part of the National Priorities Program whose NPP mission “makes complex federal budget information transparent and accessible so people can prioritize and influence how their tax dollars are spent.”  New York State’s 23^rd Congressional District, where I live, has paid over $1.8 billion of the $803 billion spent on the war in Iraq, and costofwar.com’s “Trade-Offs” page notes that my district could have used that money to convert 1.2 million households to solar energy for a year, or hire 20,789 elementary school teachers for a year, among many other possibilities.

NY’s 23^rd is home to nearly 656,000 people, and the median income here is $42,473.  I read recently that St. Lawrence County, one of eleven in the district, is also home to 12 millionaires and 38 people with adjusted gross incomes between $500,000 and $1 million.  So if those 50 people are making that kind of money, how are the rest faring of the other 655,950?

Below is a Hamburg sticker making fun of the Hansa Rostock football club (note the blue and white Hansa team colors and Hamburg’s port city trademark pirate/skull and crossbones imagery).  Those St. Pauli fans take the sport very seriously, but more on that to follow.

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 print and post flyers; the Anarchist’s Developments’s article called The Response of Cultural Studies to 9/11 Skepticism in American Popular Culture; a YouTube video about Peter Claussen als Diplomat in der DDR (Peter Claussen is a U.S. State Department colleague of a friend of mine now situated in Berlin and might be a great contact!); an Ai Weiwei photography show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau opening this Friday; and, of all things, a story about the spiritual side of the OWS protests, in which a Tom Beaudoin, associate professor of theology at Fordham University, writes,

“… when they embody visions of a possible future that influence the larger social imagination, and when they sculpt the desires of the protestors themselves for the better.  In these ways, resistance can become symbolic action, protests become like religious ritual — and in those ways, even more important.”

(Made me miss my dad, again.)

B2B also means back to Berlin!!!!!!  I’m heading over on Thursday for a week, and once again, same as my last trip, the stars are aligned for good things.  A series of demonstrations around the world will take place on Saturday, October 15, for “a global revolution.”  I’ve been trying to find a single Web site for the event, which I realize is impossible, but have only come up with various FB sites and YouTube videos.  Knowing what I’ve seen in German stickerland, however, I’m sure there will be some serious street art in Berlin.  I’m also making a short trip to Hamburg this time.  A few people have indicated that Hamburg has a pretty lively street art scene and left-wing political antifa culture.

I also learned today the Stroke Urban Art Fair #5 will be in Berlin this weekend, October 14-16, 2011.  Hot dawg!  SLU students, Spencer-la, and I traveled to Munich in May 2010 to see Stroke #2, and everyone said how the Munich show was much more focused on sales and $$.  Richer clientele.  The Berlin version is supposed to be a little more alternative.  We’ll see.

Okay, off to pack and do laundry.  Count down!

Here’s one.  DEATH NYC 15 Stickers Nude Obey Kaws Graffiti Banksky.  Such clever tagging.  I bid $6.00 for 100% Brandnew Random Stickers that will be shipped airmail from Hong Kong.

Another along those same lines.  DEATH NYC 10 Sticker Hitler Obey Kaws Graffiti Banksky.  I put in another bid for $5.01, and with 16 minutes to go, I might just win.

Waugh…..