Sticker City: Paper Graffiti Art

by Claudia Walde

A worldwide survey of one of the biggest trends in street paper works of art glued to a city's surfaces. Classic graffiti lives. But this essential book reveals how street art is continually renewing itself and concludes with a look into the future. For some forty years, city streets have been home to the modern graffiti movement, and now there is a fresh creative twist. Walls, phone booths, curbs, traffic signs―in cities around the world public surfaces are adorned with hand-painted or hand-crafted posters and stickers. Claudia Walde, aka Mad C and herself a graffiti artist, traveled the globe from Philadelphia to Prague, Barcelona to Berlin, to meet the great names in street art and to find the creative custodians of the new sticker cities. More than eighty artists are represented, with images chosen from over 7,000 examples. Mad C first covers the scene's history, including Shepard Fairey's Obey Giant propaganda campaign, Blek le Rat's stencil graffiti, and Revs's sensational sticker flood in New York City in the 1990s. Her documentation of the contemporary scene includes fascinating insights into the techniques used by today's Swoon and her amazing cut-outs, Invader's ceramic mosaics, and Above's wooden arrows. 317 illustrations, 308 in color

Genres: Art, Graffiti, Street Art, Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2007

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about 15 years old at this point, and much of the street art scene it documents has become quite mainstream by now. Which is not to take anything away from the book -- it just doesn't have quite the same freshness as when it originally came out. It opens with a brief history of graffiti as urban art and its connection to paste-up and sticker art. This all reads more or less like a Wikipedia entry and is unlikely to be very informative to anyone who's already interested in the topic. But for those new to the form, I suppose it's necessary. The bulk of the book then dives into the world of paper-based graffiti, whether it's stickering or paste-up style, including stencils, cutouts, photocopy collage, etc... The final section presents a 2-page spread for each of 26 artists, mainly from Germany, France, and the US, with the biggest name probably being Shepherd Fairey.

The size and layout is nice, with small blocks of text providing content for 300+ photos. Most of these are traditional shots documenting the art, but there are others that are richer, placing the art within the larger streetscape and context, and others showing the creators at work, either in the studio or putting up their works. All in all, the book makes for a very accessible introduction to paper street art, worth putting in the hands of both creative kids and adults open to the world.

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sticker City is a classic case of an author not trusting her audience.

The first half of the book (The History of Graffiti) is worrisome and is just a step above "Webster's defines graffiti as..." Mainstream America isn't reading this book, though. No one cares about Street Graphics except for the people who already have a basic understanding of the graffiti culture. Another big problem with the first half of the book is that the photos (which are very luxurious, I admit) don't correlate to the text on the page. For example, the author writes about the origins of tagging in the 1970s, yet the image that is juxtaposed is a contemporary poster of Obey (Andre the Giant).

The latter half of the book shifted gears and delivered what anybody who's into Street Graphics cares about in the first place: bios of artists, examples of their work, mediums and methods that they use, and even their websites.

I'd be interested in a potential sequel to Sticker City, but this book might as well have been Graffiti 101. For that kind of lesson, you'd be better off walking through downtown.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another gift from my library fairy! Very very cool. I particularly like the ones by *G* and Swoon.