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.

Countdown to Christmas: Mrs. Grossman

Christmas is almost upon us! Which means the Christmas sticker countdown is drawing to a close. 

Objectively speaking, Sandylion probably made the cutest Christmas stickers (see below), but Mrs. Grossman is the clear winner for prolific Christmas sticker output over the years, and designs that are reliably adorable in a way that doesn't have to involve smiling teddy bears and the like.

So, so cute.

If there are any stickers that communicate stillness and wonder, these are those stickers:

In the late 1980s, Mrs. Grossman used their (her?) own sticker designs to come up with these super-cute package labels:

But I have to end with the holiday mice.

Whether you're celebrating Christmas, Hannukah, the Solstice, or are enjoying a Festivus with the rest of us, happy winter holidays to all! 

On the iconography of unicorns and Pegasus

Unicorns are mentioned in the Bible nine or ten times. It is believed that the reference to a strong, one-horned animal was actually to a rhinoceros. However, Indian tradition induced western writers to believe that the unicorn was a horse-like animal with one horn; this would influence Byzantine and Italian iconography. By the later Middle Ages, it was believed that only a virgin could capture a unicorn.

Pegasus is from Greek mythology. A winged horse, he was the offspring of Poseidon and Medusa--who knew?--he sprang forth from the bleeding body of Medusa when her head was severed by Perseus. Bellerophon tamed him while he was resting on the acropolis of Corinth.

Somehow, by the time I was growing up, Pegasus and unicorns were interchangeable, or at least, closely related. It never occurred to me that Pegasus was a character, but rather, a type of horse with wings that flew over rainbows and planets and clouds. And unicorns were kind of the same, except for the flying part. 

I think stickers played no small role in fostering this assumption:

Unicorn artist Sue Dawe was profiled in Stickers Magazine and created stickers just for the readers of Stickers although I have never seen her designs used on stickers otherwise. Mostly you will remember her artwork from notebooks and folders.

Notice that this last sticker shows a mother Pegasus with a baby, just like the sticker above shows a mother unicorn with a baby. Obviously, this is not possible. My guess is that Sue Dawe never read Hesiod.

 I am not aware of either a Biblical or a Classical tradition for carousel horses. The iconographic waters were really getting muddied here.

This is a unicorn--and that's one to grow on.

Countdown to Christmas: Lisa Frank

I don't know. I mean, I don't mean to be a grouch. But in my opinion, there's something about Lisa Frank that doesn't work well with the holiday aesthetic. Tripped-out unicorns and teddy bears are fine at any other time of the year--but not at Christmas.

Stoned bear as Santa, maybe. But why the inverted rainbow and heart on the unicorn's ass? What about that says Yuletide cheer?

Sandylion addendum

I just came across some more very cute holiday stickers by Sandylion and needed to post them.

 

Stickers from Susie

I have one devoted follower of this blog, who gave me some awesome stickers-for-the-working-woman this week. Yes, more Cathy stickers!

 

Questions: why does Cathy wear curlers if her hair is always straight? Why does she have six clocks and three watches on her desk?  What in the world is she planning to wear in that last sticker in the bottom lower corner? And can I, the busy single career woman, really relate to any of these (I mean, honestly: when was the last time I physically assaulted an ATM like that?)

  Maybe a little. Except I have no idea where things are on my desk.

Yeah, more like it. But I would never wear orange to the office.

I got another cache of really wonderful stickers from this same devoted follower several years ago.

The Troll Family!

Which have an odd, Puffenstuff-like, hippy aesthetic...

 Dude. I have a Ph.D. in weed from Hampshire.

 Anyone want to go watch Xanadu?

 This just reminds me of early childhood in the 1970s.

Of course Trolls go jogging!

Thanks Susie <3