If you thought stickers were just something scored after a successful visit to the pediatrician or a way to humble brag that you’ve voted, then the multifaceted underground sticker community may come as something of a shock.
Stickers, it seems, are a certifiable phenomenon. Created by street artists who plaster them in public places around the world and collect and trade them with fellow fans, stickers are part of a robust street-art subculture.
And now comes the Atlanta Sticker Show, an event organized by sticker enthusiast and artist Trey Reames, 48, who has created similar events in cities such as Seattle, Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas.
The event is intended to bring together fellow lovers of all things sticker and introduce this semi-secret world, which hides in plain sight in every city in America, to a wider audience.
“That’s really why I’m doing all this is to share the community side of it,” Reames said in the mellow drawl of a Georgia native.
Credit: Courtesy of Trey Reames
Credit: Courtesy of Trey Reames
The free, all-ages event will take place at a massive Bankhead warehouse complex, Parcel 44, home to a skate park and covered in murals and graffiti. The three-day event will include an opening night RSVP-only party, as well as food trucks, more than 20 sticker vendors, workshops, a sticker exhibition, DIY sticker art, giveaways and a “bomb wall” featuring more than 300 sticker artists worldwide. Artists from Portland, Austin and Las Vegas will attend and be featured in the accompanying exhibition.
“Stickers have been a big part of my life since childhood,” said Reames, who grew up in Albany, Georgia, and now lives in remote southwestern Alaska.
As an undergrad at the University of Georgia, Reames promoted Atlanta native and singer-songwriter CeeLo Green’s first solo shows. While living in London and working in talent, event and project management, Reames helped promote the careers of musicians including Gnarls Barkley and Gorillaz. He worked on events in Europe for Miley Cyrus and the Karl Lagerfeld clothing brand.
“In my travels, I would always get stickers as small mementos,” he said. “I would get two: one to stick and one to keep.”
After he moved to Alaska, Reames started making his own stickers under the name StickerBombTheTrap in 2018.
Credit: Courtesy of Trey Reames
Credit: Courtesy of Trey Reames
Sticker art is a subgenre of the larger street art scene. Like other forms of street art, it’s a populist, handmade response to the daily inundation of advertising imagery. Artists seek to counter the corporate messages found on billboards, bus stops and TV, computer and phone screens with their own personal, creative sticker art.
According to director Will Deloney’s upcoming “Sticker Movie” documentary that will screen as a sneak peek at the Atlanta Sticker Show, “slap taggers” plaster their sticker art on any surface they can find from trash cans to street signs to urinals.
One of the obstacles that graffiti and street artists have always faced is the time it takes to create a tag or design and the risk this entails of getting caught in a potentially illegal act. Sticker artists can run the same legal risks.
Reames said sticker artists try to be respectful of private property and tend to restrict their activities to places like East Atlanta Village, Little Five Points and the Krog Tunnel that already have a robust sticker and graffiti presence.
“If you do it somewhere illegal, it gets taken down anyway,” Reames said. “The sticker street art community is about getting your stickers up in places where they will be appreciated and where they will ride out — stay there.”
The advantage of sticker art over spray paint is that it allows artists to quickly put up their artwork (thus reducing their chances of getting caught or arrested) or even outsource that work to someone in another city or country.
“Sticker street art is the most immediate form of street art,” Reames said.
Credit: Courtesy of Trey Reames
Credit: Courtesy of Trey Reames
New York City artist BuyIt, whose work will appear at the Atlanta event, is featured in the “Sticker Movie.”
“It’s the most democratic art form, I think, that ever existed,” BuyIt said in the documentary.
Sticker art does have features that differentiate it from other types of street art, including artists from all walks of life: teenagers, retirees, stay-at-home moms and people like Reames.
In another feature unique to the sticker genre, artists swap their art through the mail, which allows fellow artists to put up and photograph the stickers. In that way, an artist’s work can, in a sense, travel the globe.
“I go to the post office every day,” said Reames, who currently has hundreds of envelopes full of stickers waiting for him back home.
“I would get something from Japan,” he added as an example of his usual routine, “I would stick it up somewhere and take a picture, send it back to them. And they would take a picture of mine and send it back to me. So it’s a way of getting up all around the world.”
EVENT PREVIEW
“The Atlanta Sticker Show”
July 28-30. Opening night party 7-11 p.m. Friday, RSVP required to stickerbombthetrap@gmail.com. 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Saturday and 1-8 p.m. Sunday. Free. Parcel 44 warehouse complex, 1070 Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway NW, Atlanta. instagram.com/stickerbombthetrap.
About the Author
