(ARTICLE) STYLE WEEKLY - STUCK ON YOU

Written By: Andrew Cothern

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

“Hello My Name Is” highlights sticker culture with works from hundreds of artists around the world.

Richmond artist Ian Hess is kicking off a month-long, multi-layered art project that puts sticker culture in the spotlight.

The series “Hello My Name Is,” which kicks off at Gallery5 during the First Friday art walk, is an exhibition highlighting sticker culture as an art form featuring more than 270 artists from around the world.

Hess, known for his work with Little Giant Society, Supply RVA, and the development of the Manchester Art Park (for which he was named one of Style Weekly’s people to watch in the arts in last year’s Fall Arts Preview), saw the similarities of name tags at office parties and networking events to the artistic ways of sticker making.

“It’s still an introduction to someone,” he says. “Sticker making is the same way. You get introduced to the artists through their work.”

Each piece of artwork is a custom-made vinyl sticker that uses a “Label 228” base sticker as the canvas. “Label 228” is a sticker issued by the United States Postal Service for labeling packages that is free of charge and can be acquired in large quantities. Due to its widespread availability, the large areas of blank space in the design, and its ability to handle different artistic mediums, the label has become widely used by sticker artists.

“It’s become kind of similar to the ‘Hello, my name is’ sticker,” Hess says. “It’s free and accessible. Anyone who can get their hands on it. It’s paper, so you can do just about anything on it. It’s kind of become this staple of the sticker making world.”

With the exhibition, Hess wants to highlight repetition, distinctness, collectability, and longevity, which are prevalent in sticker culture. He also wants to create opportunities for the Richmond community to engage with a global movement.

“[The sticker world] is such an insanely rambunctious, generous, weird and hyper-connected art world,” Hess says. “Each one of the people in it is just so willing to give and share, and every sticker artist I know has a hundred designs, if not thousands. It’s just wild.”

The exhibition will serve as the cornerstone for additional activities throughout the month, including a screening of the documentary “Sticker Movie” at the Byrd Theatre. The 2023 film delves into the history and culture of sticker making, slap taggers, and the diverse community of collectors.

The project will also include a unique mobile art piece with a sticker-covered bus. Thousands of stickers submitted by participating artists, volunteers, and donations will be used to cover an entire bus, turning it into a rolling public artwork. The concept was inspired by a similar project in Estonia called Stencibility in 2024, but this will be the first time the idea is brought to American streets.

“They got thousands of stickers to cover a transit bus and I thought that was such a Richmondesque thing and would do great here,” Hess says.

After unsuccessful attempts to get a city bus plastered with stickers, Hess discovered a government surplus website with recently decommissioned school buses up for auction and quickly jumped on the opportunity.

“My friend and I went to see the buses a day before the auction and we found the perfect one we wanted almost immediately,” he says. “It had new tires, a Mercedes-Benz engine, new batteries, fresh oil, a full tank of diesel, a wheelchair ramp, and only some minor electrical problems. We knew that was our Sticker Bus.”

And despite a heart-racing bidding war with another interested buyer at the auction, Hess managed to win the auction at what he says was “an insanely low price for a full-size school bus.”

Hess put the callout to artists and volunteers around the world to submit sticker art that would cover the bus from head to tail pipe before coating the entire thing in an automotive finish to preserve the artwork. The Sticker Bus will be on display at the exhibition opening and used in the future for artist field trips to the Manchester Art Park, gallery rides, trips to the VMFA, and more.

“There are so many ideas coming out of the woodwork for ways we can use this bus,” Hess says. “We could do paint workshops or go out in the community for projects showing off the artwork. It’s so flexible with what we can do because it’s such a minimalist construction.”

Hess hopes that this exhibition will expose people to stickers as an emergent art form, which he says has become a staple of the modern day cityscape.

“Any city you go to, you’ll see stickers on the back of a stop sign, a bar bathroom, on an electrical box, or a doorway,” he says. “You get exposed to that artist and learn who they are. That kind of encapsulates the theme of ‘Hello My Name Is’ so it all just seems very connected.”

“Hello My Name Is” kicks off Sept. 5 from 5-11 p.m. at Gallery5 featuring music performances by Solace Sovay, Ducttape Jesus, Snack Truck, and Dropheads. The screening of “Sticker Movie” takes place Sept. 13 at the Byrd Theatre. More information can be found at littlegiantsociety.org.

Written By: Andrew Cothern

ORIGINAL ARTICLE