News
Page 4
Portland’s
subversive
sticker
culture
Street Roots • September 8-14, 2017
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Two street artists show
us why Portland’s
underground paste-up
community is
internationally
renowned
Portland street artists Skam and Kitska peruse a wall near Northeast 17th Avenue and Alberta Street. Skam estimates there are 50 active paste-up artists locally.
B Y E M IL Y G R E E N
S T A F F W R IT E R
f you know where to look, you may have
noticed: Portland is plastered with little
pieces of guerrilla art.
Along main drags in popular
neighborhoods, street artists have adhered
their miniature works to the backs of street
signs and on utility boxes and poles, bike
racks, newspaper bins and dumpsters.
Their stickers are often
politically charged, aimed at
consumerism or political
figures. Some are whimsical,
others are gory, and styles
range from conceptual and
comical to photorealistic or
abstract.
What they all have in
common is that they’re the
product of an unrelenting
subculture of artists who,
over the course of the last
decade, have elevated
Portland to the
sticker capital of
the U.S. and, some
argue, the world.
“Portland is
quite remarkable in
the level and quality
of our stickers,” said
Tiffany Conklin, an urban
researcher and co-director at Portland
Street Art Alliance.
She attributes Portland’s rise in sticker
fame to the do-it-yourself nature of its
artists’ skillful work, and the way the
community pools its resources to purchase
printing machinery and support one
another.
“They’ve created this pretty complex
I
system to
really good quality results out of it,” Conklir
said.
These same artists are also responsible
for the papier-mache-like posters attached
to overpass columns, beneath bridges and
on the sides of various buildings around
town. Created in a studio with hand-cut
stencils and spray paint or hand drawn,
they go up quickly between layers of
homemade paste mixtures hastily brushed
under and over the posters to keep
them in place.
These days, it’s not uncommon
for international paste-up artists to
make a point of passing through
Portland to add their mark to the
urban landscape as well.
Recent visitors have included
Parisian artist PolarBear Stencils;
Tenet, of Melbourne, Australia;
Pyramid Oracle, from Berlin; and
London’s D7606 and C3, his wife,
who came to Portland on their
honeymoon.
While here, these
foreign renegades hang
out with the local
street-artist community,
hitting the town at
night and slapping up
stickers and posters
together along the way.
One of Portland’s best-known
street artists, Skam, estimates there are
currently 50 active sticker makers locally, of
all ages.
Periodically, he said, a new artist will pop
up and “smash the city,” covering it with
quality artwork, but then disappear in a
year’s time, or a “sticker season.”
Each paste-up artist has an alias and
unique
angle or character
they’re known for
replicating.
For Portland artist Placebo Effect, it’s pill
and syringe characters with legs and wind
up keys protruding from their backs.
Skam’s angle is shaming figures in
popular culture who he deems “scammers.”
In the past, he’s featured Jerry Falwell, both
George Bushes, Casey Anthony, Charles
Manson and Bill O’Reilly. He’s also known
for a sticker that reads, “Save the planet,
kill yourself,” with an image of a man in a
suit and tie blowing his brains out.
Many artists use the free Priority Mail
stickers from the post office to display their
work, also known as Label 228s. They
collect, gift and trade different editions of
these labels for drawing, stenciling or
Photoshop printing.
In Portland, many stylized images are
mass produced with stencils, woodblocks or
silkscreen printing on adhesive vinyl sheets,
which are more durable.
Shepard Fairey made famous this
approach to street art beginning in 1989.
His Andre the Giant Obey stickers went up
P H O T O B Y E M IL Y G R E E N
coast, thanks to his very
busy network of friends.
Character creation caught on among t
majority of sticker artists about 10 years
when California artist Yo909 created a
character and invited other artists to des
their own versions of it, Skam explained.
That’s when he came up with his: a redn
representing ignorance.
For many, street art is a way to spread
their message, communicate with each
other, and propel their online followings
increase their visibility.
For Portland artist Kitska, it was a Da^
Bowie poster she pasted up at Seattle’s I
Place Market the day after his death at tl
start of last year that gained her hundred
of Instagram followers.
Skam, who’s been making stickers sine
2004, said he first networked with other
artists in the now-defunct online forum
Sticker Minions, along with Myspace. Th
worldwide community later moved to Flic
See STICKERS, page 5