Release Celebration for Stencil Pirates!

Wed. December, 15th
Release Celebration for Stencil Pirates!
with Josh MacPhee
7 PM
FREE!
at the AK Press Warehouse

Stencil Pirates (published by Soft Skull Press) is the most comprehensive book dedicated to the street art of the stencil. The book contains an exhaustive collection of close to 1000 photographs from around the globe. The photos show work by hundreds of different artists, exposing the width and breadth of stencil graffiti, from political to abstract and purely aesthetic, from tagging to public announcements. Stencil Pirates offers in-depth writings on the complex history of stencil graffiti, its political context, and how stencils fit into the larger pantheon of street expression. It discusses stenciling as a way for political movements to resist and mark territory, whether as part of gentrification struggles in New York and San Francisco or as part of the general uprising in Argentina over the past couple years.

About the author:
Josh MacPhee's art straddles a number of cultural mediums. He is a street artist, designer, curator, and activist. A street stenciler and poster maker for over a decade, he also runs a radical art distribution project, justseeds.org, as a way to develop and distribute t-shirts, posters, and stickers with revolutionary content. He organizes the Celebrate People's History Poster Project, an ongoing poster series in which different artists create posters to document and remember moments in radical history. He also collectively organizes agit-prop cultural actions with ad-hoc groups of artists under various organizational names such as "Department of Space and Land Reclamation" and "Street.Rec."

Josh will be speaking on the book and presenting a slideshow on the history of street stenciling. He will be joined by two local local artist/writers, Melissa Klein (author and illustrator of the Inkling zine and editor of the book Looking and Other Stories) and Erick Lyle (editor of the zines SCAM and The Turd-Filled Donut).