Sticker Street Art That We Can Love Again

Our disillusionment with Spacecraft last year left us with flagging enthusiasm to look at street stickers. Far too many guerilla marketers, it seemed, were hawking their shit with cheap, mass-produced, vinyl stickers. It was enough to cause our eyes and mind to turn down the volume on sticker art.

On the one hand, it gave us time to re-focus on paint. We eventually noticed some new and more elaborate pieces from 1+1=3 --stuff beyond just tags. (Many thanks, BTW, for tagging our Flickr shots with artists' names.) On the other hand, we began to wonder if the marketting world had finally subsumed every remaining square inch of public space.

In these dark months, Heck valiantly kept the pilot light going with great wheat-pasted flyers and posters as well as the occasional 3-D art. And starheadboy's fantastic characters kept the sticker landscape from sliding into total domination by MySpace band URLs and jank-ass snowboard companies. (There are a few others and we apologize for not calling you out.)

More recently, Narboo caught our attention with a huge push onto the streets. But it was Sirkullay who really got us back on the sticker track, quite literally. We were out for a walk a while back along Roosevelt near 65th and started seeing her work. So we went on a little treasure hunt. A few times the trail went cold but we found our way back. Finally, we lost it on 65th Street under the freeway but not before finding some really beautiful work:

Adding to the convergence of Heck and Narboo and Starheadboy, Sirkullay made us fall in love with street stickers again. It took us back to the earliest days of our street photography when Roboe's hand-painted tiles made us commit to the documentation and study of ephemeral street art. What is immediately apparent above are the rich textures and colors and hand-crafting used to create these gems. It is something that we call the hand of the creator: you can see it, reach out and touch it and immediately connect to the artist. It is more apparent than a vinyl sticker and not unlike viewing gallery art. We're thankful that our streets are brighter because of it.