Voices of the People: 110 Years of Street Stickers From Around the World

Voices of the People: 110 Years of Street Stickers from Around the World Selections from the People’s History Archive (USA) and Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum (Germany) Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University opens a new exhibition, Voices of the People: 110 Years of Street Stickers from Around the World, on Thursday, Sept. 17. The exhibition considers the publicly placed sticker as an often overlooked form of ideological exchange, information dissemination, and human expression. In the United States and across the globe, stickers have been used to express political dissent, help communities to coalesce, promote creative work, or simply to personalize individual property. Voices of the People reveals the vast communicative power of the humble sticker. The exhibition draws from the extensive collections built by curators Catherine Tedford, former director of Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University, and Oliver Baudach, founder and director of Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum in Berlin, Germany. More than 2,000 stickers will be on display, referencing significant social and cultural movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from early labor unions to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Alongside these, artist-produced stickers that experiment with aesthetic interventions in urban landscapes are also featured. Taken together, the exhibition demonstrates that stickers have been speaking truth to power and enlivening public spaces for well over a century. “The original stickers in this exhibition were intended for the streets, not a museum. And yet, what they have lost in immediacy, they have gained in testimony: proof for future generations that someone, somewhere, cared enough to draw or print a handful of stickers — or a thousand — and believed that even the smallest act might help change the world,” comment co-curators Tedford and Baudach. This exhibition includes opportunities for visitors to develop their own messages or artwork and to make and place their own stickers in an in-gallery immersive urban streetscape. The exhibition opening reception, which is free and open to the public, will be held on Thursday, Sept. 17, beginning at 5:30 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view until Dec. 13, 2026. Please contact Picker Art Gallery at [email protected] for more information, or visit the website at www.colgate.edu/picker.