Winners Announced in the Brush Art Gallery’s Shepard Fairey Bootleg Sticker Contest!
From over 60 sixty online submissions, three winners were selected in the Brush Art Gallery’s recent Shepard Fairey bootleg sticker contest: Bruho (Canada), Charles Bourcq (France), and Mikayla Quinn, SLU Class of 2023 (USA).
Bruho, a Toronto-based college professor by day and street artist by night, is a member of the Canadian collective Visual Noise and the global Secret Society of Supervillain Artists. His art is often digital collages of selfies wearing his mask incorporated into pulp art. The artist is a collector of Shepard Fairey prints having about 50 signed copies of them. His favorite says “OBEY the laws of physics” and is displayed in his office at the University. See more about Bruho's shenanigans on Instagram (@bruho.to) or on his website bruho.ca.
Bruho is a sticker art character that represents a mystic luchador. He has many “carnales,” which is Spanish for close friends, a posse. The art, a homage to Shepard Fairey, is a digital edit of a self-portrait of the sticker artist wearing a custom-made mask.
Charles Bourcq (@masterofdisaster2) is a longtime fan of street art, graffiti, and skateboard culture. Influenced by Shepard Fairey, Dave Kinsey, and Jim Muir, Charles’s work has been published in the punk-skater magazine, Thrasher. He owns several Shepard Fairey-designed skateboards and dedicated the Origin sticker design in the contest to Shepard’s early love of skateboarding.
Charles’s “Origin” bootleg sticker design riffs on the Dogtown Skateboard logo, replacing the “DOGTOWN” company logo with the word “OBEY” in the same type font.
Mikayla “Milk” Quinn (@mikaylabellaart), SLU Class of 2023, is a queer, New York-based artist attending St. Lawrence University. They are mainly an acrylic painter, but often dabble in several different mediums to produce work with common themes such as feminism, sexuality, nature, and social justice. For more, visit their shop on Etsy.
Milk writes, “This design is an original reductive woodcut print titled sleeping with men. It is a commentary on the inequity female-presenting people face in hookup culture, especially speaking to the ‘locker room talk’ that men engage in to slut-shame partners they have in common, without consequence. The text says ‘not a SLUT’ but the word ‘SLUT’ remains bold and in your face as a function of reclamation. There is strength in taking back words meant to shame us.”
The contest winners were selected by Oliver Baudach, director of the Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum, Berlin, Germany, and Catherine Tedford, Director of the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University in conjunction with their recent exhibition Inspiring | Controversial | OBEY! Silkscreen Prints and Street Stickers by Shepard Fairey.
