Helen Stickler shows her video of Shepard Fairey's work in a room set aside for any aspiring sticker artist to post their own work. Fairey's work may be the most notorious among the group here. His Andre the Giant has a Posse stickers can be seen in just about every urban environment in almost every major city in the world. I remember coming across Andre the Giant stickers in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Rome, London and Athens. Fairey has printed over a million stickers in various designs that have been dispersed across the urban landscape.
Stickers represent industry, mass communication and easy access.
This show expands upon current notions of art, while begging the question of why that bias even exists in 1999. The content and context of this show is no surprise as the work of ICA Assistant Curator, Alex Baker. He is a doctoral student of Visual Anthropology at Temple University. Sticker Shock comes out of his studies of visual and material artifacts as manifestations of culture. The sticker show investigates the ways in which a counterculture in the American mainstream, conceives of art.