Catching up

Wow, I have fallen behind in my sticker blogging. Time to catch up.

One highlight of my fall was a trip to Russia back in September. You wouldn't think that Russia is a great sticker-shopping venue, and for the most part you would be right. But then I found these stickers at a souvenir shop:

Seriously, these are like the most adorable stickers I've seen all year.

And I bought them without giving it a second thought. Sorry to report, I'm kind of happier with puffy, colorful nesting-doll stickers than I would be with actual nesting dolls.

The other notable sticker acquisition this fall is a group of puffy Hallmark stickers made for teachers to give out to their students at Halloween and Thanksgiving time. My dear friend Amanda, also a sticker collector and a teacher, found them and purchased them with the understanding that when things are this corny they circle back around and become hilarious again, and that I should absolutely have them:

These have a kind of nostalgia factor, since I remember getting encouragement stickers from my teachers back in the 1980s.

"Gourd job" is a stretch; "You Rock" is probably the best one. And "Good Gravy" is just as cute as can be.

Happy fall!

Mary Engelbreit v. Lisa Frank

I think because I was younger and more impressionable in the eighties, I have more of a soft spot for 1980s nostalgia (Michael Jackson, Family Ties, leg warmers) than I do for 1990s nostalgia (Julia Roberts, Lilith Fair, dress clips). I put this to the test going through my Mary Engelbreit stickers. Let me make it clear that I love her work as an illustrator, but some of her concepts are whimsical and nonsensical in a way I don't really get.

 

I mean, I do get it: chair of bowlies. Cute. I might like it better without the caption.

 Princess of Quite a Lot. Okay. Like of nail polish and cake?

Many of her designs seemed targeted toward suburban, middle-aged women who enjoyed gardening, tea, and platitudes.

These are just adorable illustrations. For some reason the words and overall themes don't grab me. I wonder if I'd be more into them if I'd been introduced to concepts like "time for tea" when I was twelve.

The reason I wonder this is that I was super-into Lisa Frank, whose airbrushed designs scream commercialism, whose colors are garish and whose designs make no sense at all. Granted, Lisa Frank was marketed at kids and Mary Engelbreit at readers of Victoria magazine, but still. I understand the appeal of Lisa Frank, even today.

Yes!  A bear on a rainbow ice cream cone! Clouds raining hearts! Lands made up of junk food!

 I don't need to take mushrooms to accept at face value cats embracing rainbow moons, oversized clowns with unicorns in their hands, or tropical birds hanging on upside-down rainbows in the sky. Nope, no explanation needed.

Perhaps I just have a preference for the rococo, but it's also true that my tastes in 1986 were unsophisticated and, as a results, my standards for excellence were lower then.

Loved it.

So I have to wonder if my preferences are skewed as the result of my age. Or is Mary Engelbreit simply too grown-up and wordy?

Super Bowl Sunday

Go, Pats!

Product Placement

For many years when I was growing up, my sister and I weren't technically allowed to watch commercial television. Except that we did; I got to watch Captain Kangaroo, and by the time I was seven or eight, we had cable and my mom had given up trying to prevent us from watching tv. 

But when I was very young, I was impressionable, and  now that I think about it, there was some seriously aggressive marketing going on. Would you let your preschooler watch tv when this is what she saw during the breaks?  Crazy Cow cereal. Rub-a-dub dolly. Coke. Weebles Treehouse. Holy crap, I needed these products! Coke could bring world peace, change your day for the better--and why wasn't I allowed to drink out of a bottle, anyway?!

Product placement, specifically targeted towards children, seems to have continued into my sticker collection, but by the 1980s I was a little bit less impressionable.

 

Why Burger King is pointing at his wrist when he isn't wearing a watch is beyond me. Is he trying to tell us it's "time" to go to Burger King? Or is this something infinitely more perverse?

I do remember consuming a lot of Bubble Yum and Whopper, Jrs. in middle school though. Hmm.

Michael Jackson Tribute

I am wondering if anyone else out there collected these Topps Michael Jackson cards back in the 1980s?

Not only did they come with collectible cards, as you can see, they also contained a stick of very stale gum and some really awesome stickers (i.e., the stickers that have the lilac border around the photo) that are basically just stills from Michael Jackson music videos:

 Those other two shown above I collected separately and are from the Jacksons' Victory Tour. I think they represent Randy and Tito, respectively.

The Topps assortment formed the core of my collection of MJ-inspired stickers.Where in the world did I get the other ones? I can only guess from a gumball machine outside the grocery store.

Cocodack

I received some puffy rooster stickers for Christmas. I quite like them:

I do not have a lot of rooster stickers.

Nor do I have any other stickers of Korean origin. The package explains:

Funny sticker world! I want to go to there!

Wait, are those eggs? Maybe some of them are supposed to be hens--which would explain the beaded chokers they are wearing. I guess hens can also have combs.

If anyone can decipher the guide on the back, I'd love to know.



Stickers as art, art as stickers

Among the most awesome gifts I received this Christmas were a set of Shepard Fairey stickers. Growing up in New England in the 1990s, I remember seeing "Andre the Giant has a Posse" stickers on nearly every toll booth along I-95 and on random street signs. So it was a treat to see Fairey's work recognized in a major museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 2009, an event made even more exciting by the controversy over copyright issues for Fairey's Obama Hope image and the artist's own arrest. 

I am pretty sure these stickers are meant to be applied to further toll booths and street signs. I've reserved a couple of extras for that purpose, but I'm pretty law-abiding and am going to hold on to most of them.

Fairey's artwork is meant to be on stickers, which is why these are so great. But I have a small collection of other art stickers that I've collected over the years. These have all been issued by museums, which -- speaking of copyright -- to my knowledge all hold the copyright for the images in question.

From my own institution, the Museum of Fine Arts, these packages of American art stickers:

The following are from the 1990s. They came in a box on rolls and highlight the tremendous collection of Impressionist paintings:

 My favorite is the Caillebotte:

Other museums have issued stickers, such as the French national museums:

Details of water lilies

Unicorn tapestries (Musee de Cluny, Paris)

 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, came out with these for their traveling exhibition of the quilts of Gee's Bend:

 The Barnes Foundation issued stickers of their highlights. Where else could you possibly get a Chaim Soutine sticker?

I like that they've included the accession number and gallery location.

My favorite art stickers, though, are the ones I got at the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, Mass. A sampling:

Wait for it...

These are all on transparent paper so that the colors of the collage shine through. Love them!

Happy New Year!

A little late.