Welcome to the new/updated site! Since 2002, your old-school website for all things stencils. Please consider donating what you can to support the much-needed upgrade. Photo, video, links, and exhibit info submissions always welcome. Enjoy and stay curious.
Saw this on a New Hampshire highway, turned around, hit the exit, walked up a bank, snapped the pic.
All the USA archives are updated (artists archives coming soon)! We'll spend most of the week posting direct links for easy access. Had a totally fun time looking through all these photos. Portland, ME and NH visits happened while on an activist gig. Minnesota snaps went down while in the state doing another activist gig. Snapped some Baltimore, MD and Detroit, MI pics while on the Stencil Nation tour. Was just in St. Louis, MO after the recent solar eclipse. Memories!
Probably a 20-year-old photograph from the Boston streets.
Here we go with the latest Stencil Archive updates. Slowed down a bit, but still on our minds as we continue to process the incoming submissions. What do we have for you this Fall-Back Friday? Why, just some more A-Z USA updates. There's politics in this pile, but nothing focused on presidents :)
Indiana (most of this from the Stencil Nation tour visit)
Iowa (a chunk of this from a fun, Ben Cohen activist gig visit)
Object Art, by Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt (1968-1970; photo by Robert Rosen; from BSA)
Stencil Archive is always looking for stories and photographs to fill in the many gaps of lost/forgotten/unnoticed history relating to stencils in the streets. Brooklyn Street Art just represented, posting a great article by Ted Riederer discussing Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt's one particular environmental stencil project that has mostly been "lost" in the pre-digital cobwebs of time. BSA's post has many more photos, so we recommend that you all go there to check them out. And we here at Stencil Archive always have deep respect for Jaime Rojo's work over there in NYC. BSA is holding it down outside of social media, and for that, we tip the hat.
Graffiti as Concept: Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt’s Impact on 1960s New York’s Streets October 15, 2024 Artists
Special guest Ted Riederer shares the story of a New York artist who, as a gay street youth, made his mark with bold, conceptual graffiti. Blending street culture with high-concept art, his early works challenged boundaries, reshaped graffiti history, and paved the way for a pioneering career in immersive installations and social activism.
by Ted Riederer
Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, whose work is collected by prestigious institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum, and who was honored by President Barack Obama, began his career as a conceptual graffiti/street artist in the late 1960s. Known for his numinous sculptures and installations crafted from everyday materials like staples, cellophane, paper bags, and Scotch tape, Tommy’s journey started with a bold move. At just 20 years old, in 1968, he launched a spray paint stencil campaign on 4th Street in the East Village—a calculated street art action that reshaped and rewrites the many narratives of graffiti history.
How did Stencil Archive go this long - into a third decade - without giving Josh MacPhee a proper archive? Is it because Josh himself is multi-talented and basically unassuming with regards to his cut outs? The fact that many of these photos are from the 1990s-early 2000s, well before he wrote "Stencil Pirates", one of the first modern looks at street art with a total political edge? No. The reason is that this DIY site always has a long list of things that need to get done. Josh never asked for an archive. He has many other amazing projects going.
While getting around to doing an A-W USA archives refresh, we hit Josh's work from his time living in Chicago, IL. Josh has done much for political postering and stenciling all these years. At long last, Josh gets an artist stencil archive. While we have your attention, here's the archive for a San Francisco mural Josh painted with another early 2000s legend: Claude Moller. We assisted, got the wall, took photographs of the process, and were happy to see this mural (now slowly rotting in storage in Bernal Heights) get a two-page spread in "Mission Muralismo".
