Gallery Director Catherine Tedford’s project to build a collection and digital archive of street stickers was featured recently in a chapter of The Social Movement Archive published by Litwin Books in 2021. Tedford has worked with street stickers -- both as a media maker and as a collector -- for much of her life. She first discovered street stickers while visiting Berlin, Germany, in 2003 and has since collected over 12,000 original, unused stickers from countries around the world. She began archiving stickers in 2004 through St. Lawrence University’s Street Art Graphics digital archive. In 2015, she received a four-year grant from the Council of Independent Colleges to continue digitizing stickers, with a focus at the end to catalogue work by female street artists. Additional funding support was provided by the German Academic Exchange Service.
Tedford writes about street stickers on her research blog, Stickerkitty, and has presented papers at national and international academic conferences. Her paper, “Street Stickers as Subversive Visual Discourse” will be presented online at the International Visual Literacy Association annual conference in August 2022. She has written chapters on Industrial Workers of the World "stickerettes" or "silent agitators" for Stickers: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art, Vol. 2 (Rizzoli, 2019) and for Signal 06: A Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture (Justseeds, 2018). For more information about the collection and archive, see Sticky art: the Street Art Graphics collection on the Artstor Blog.
