Street art stickers have become an ever-present global trend, taking over city sidewalks, building walls, traffic signs and just about any other accessible surface of the built environment. Stickers have validated themselves in today’s ever-changing modern society not by their impressive size or their technological advancement. Rather, they have influenced society due to their cultural significance, conceptual relevance and intellectual contribution to worldly perspectives from everyday people. Street art stickers, when analyzed in connection with specific locations and times in history, provide an in-depth look into the cultures in which they were born.
Pegatinas Políticas is a political sticker project by St. Lawrence University student research fellow, Laurel Hurd (’16). The purpose of the fellowship was to create an interactive mapping and timeline project using an extensive archive of sticker street art from all over Spain.
Collaborating with her mentor Catherine Tedford, who for several years has been building a digital archive of street art stickers from around the world, Laurel was able to catalogue a variety of stickers and create exhibitions revealing different social, political and economic events in Spain from the 1970s to present day. Hurd and Tedford are working with Eric Williams-Bergen to create a web-based digital platform to support the project.
