If you know where to look, you may have noticed: Portland is plastered with little pieces of guerrilla art.
Along main drags in popular neighborhoods, street artists have adhered their miniature works to the backs of street signs and on utility boxes and poles, bike racks, newspaper bins and dumpsters.
Their stickers are often politically charged, aimed at consumerism or political figures. Some are whimsical, others are gory, and styles range from conceptual and comical to photorealistic or abstract.
What they all have in common is that they’re the product of an unrelenting subculture of artists who, over the course of the last decade, have elevated Portland to the sticker capital of the U.S. and, some argue, the world.
“Portland is quite remarkable in the level and quality of our stickers,” said Tiffany Conklin, an urban researcher and co-director at Portland Street Art Alliance.
She attributes Portland’s rise in sticker fame to the do-it-yourself nature of its artists’ skillful work, and the way the community pools its resources to purchase printing machinery and support one another.
“They’ve created this pretty complex system to make all of this happen and get really good quality results out of it,” Conklin said.
These same artists are also responsible for the papier-mâché-like posters attached to overpass columns, beneath bridges and on the sides of various buildings around town. Created in a studio with hand-cut stencils and spray paint or hand drawn, they go up quickly between layers of homemade paste mixtures hastily brushed under and over the posters to keep them in place.
These days, it’s not uncommon for international paste-up artists to make a point of passing through Portland to add their mark to the urban landscape as well.
Recent visitors have included Parisian artist PolarBear Stencils; Tenet, of Melbourne, Australia; Pyramid Oracle, from Berlin; and London’s D7606 and C3, his wife, who came to Portland on their honeymoon.
While here, these foreign renegades hang out with the local street-artist community, hitting the town at night and slapping up stickers and posters together along the way.
One of Portland’s best-known street artists, Skam, estimates there are currently 50 active sticker makers locally, of all ages.
Periodically, he said, a new artist will pop up and “smash the city,” covering it with quality artwork, but then disappear in a year’s time, or a “sticker season.”
Each paste-up artist has an alias and unique angle or character they’re known for replicating.
For Portland artist Placebo Effect, it’s pill and syringe characters with legs and wind-up keys protruding from their backs.
Skam’s angle is shaming figures in popular culture who he deems “scammers.” In the past, he’s featured Jerry Falwell, both George Bushes, Casey Anthony, Charles Manson and Bill O’Reilly. He’s also known for a sticker that reads, “Save the planet, kill yourself,” with an image of a man in a suit and tie blowing his brains out.
Many artists use the free Priority Mail stickers from the post office to display their work, also known as Label 228s. They collect, gift and trade different editions of these labels for drawing, stenciling or Photoshop printing.
In Portland, many stylized images are mass produced with stencils, woodblocks or silkscreen printing on adhesive vinyl sheets, which are more durable.
Shepard Fairey made famous this approach to street art beginning in 1989. His Andre the Giant Obey stickers went up coast to coast, thanks to his very busy network of friends.
Character creation caught on among the majority of sticker artists about 10 years ago when California artist Yo909 created a character and invited other artists to design their own versions of it, Skam explained. That’s when he came up with his: a redneck representing ignorance.
For many, street art is a way to spread their message, communicate with each other, and propel their online followings and increase their visibility.
For Portland artist Kitska, it was a David Bowie poster she pasted up at Seattle’s Pike Place Market the day after his death at the start of last year that gained her hundreds of Instagram followers.
Skam, who’s been making stickers since 2004, said he first networked with other artists in the now-defunct online forum Sticker Minions, along with Myspace. The worldwide community later moved to Flickr, and now nearly everyone has an Instagram account.
Skam has more than 18,000 followers on Instagram, taking the lead among Portland paste-up artists.
He and Kitska gave Street Roots a tour of their home studio and let us tag along as they stickered Northeast Alberta Street on a recent August night.
They are both in their 30s and hold professional day jobs. They asked we not reveal their real names or certain personal details, given the illegality of their artwork.
As we chatted in the couple’s living room, Skam was busy cutting out Mike Pence and Donald Trump stickers with scissors. They’re intricately stenciled and silkscreen-printed zombie heads with upside-down crosses on their foreheads – a throwback to the religious zealots he grew up around in small-town North Dakota.
“I’ve been labeled as a political whore artist,” he said, “or political gore.”
It’s easy to see this hobby has become a lifestyle for Skam and Kitska. In a corner of their house by their kitchen, dozens of large vinyl rolls are propped against the wall, all fetched from dumpsters behind signage stores and purchased at Scrap PDX, a nonprofit that sells reused materials for arts and crafts.
Freshly printed stickers cover a makeshift table that spreads across the length of their living room, and an eclectic collection of art covers nearly every inch of their walls.
The couple enjoy cutting stickers out of the vinyl sheets Skam has printed as they sit together watching horror movies or documentaries. Sometimes they go on “sticker dates,” which usually entail bar hopping and sticker bombing along the way.
In their studio, located in the garage, file cabinets full of stencils, a full silk-screening setup, shelf upon shelf of spray paint cans and other artist materials pack the space. Hand-drawn characters, stickers and signatures left behind by dozens of visiting and local street artists decorate every surface.
Skam has been creating art since he was a teenager, taking classes in junior high and later creating abstract paintings with ice and snow.
But then he found out about culture jamming, and he was hooked. Culture jamming is art used to send, typically, an anti-consumer message. It can take the form of a logo parody or a spin on a corporate catch phrase.
He picked up a book on culture jamming and discovered that some artists were using stencils to spray their art on sidewalks and the sides of buildings. It inspired him to figure out how to make his own stencils.
“I had more success with putting my stuff on the streets than I ever did in a gallery,” he said.
And doing so has grown his brand.
He sells T-shirts and hoodies online, along with stickers and posters. Bacon Skateboards recently began featuring his work on four of their boards, and a Los Angeles production company is considering Skam and Kitska for a paid reality TV show or documentary, to be determined at a later date.
Skam moved to Portland in 2007, when there were only about three paste-up artists plastering the town – him, Nasty Nate and Mr. Say, who turned in his stickers for a tattoo gun awhile back.
But Skam has been a driving force behind Portland’s rise in sticker fame, although you won’t hear it from him; he’s quick to credit the entire community with putting Portland on the map.
He and fellow artist Rx Skulls were the backbone behind the Sticker Nerds shows, starting in Salem in 2010, and then in Portland in 2011 and 2014. Artists from around the world sent in thousands of stickers for these well-attended events.
“Skam really pushed the scene quite early in terms of making his own stickers and doing all that hand-cut, wood-cut block printing,” Conklin said. “Rx Skulls started after him, but Rx has been an amazing community resource. He is really highly skilled with the way he does his vinyl printouts and has some amazing machinery. He quit a really great job to do this full time, now that he has so many other artists that want to use his (printing) services. He has quite a production going on – like, worldwide.”
Rx Skulls is known for – you guessed it – skull designs. His friends say he found sticker-making therapeutic after a battle with brain cancer. He also has an online store, complete with patches, pins, bandanas and stickers.
Other prominent Portland paste-up artists worth checking out include Voxx Romana, Dead Red, Wokeface, Kristadaggermouth, Satan’s Spawn and Dr. Scott, just to name a few.
FURTHER READING: The mysterious street artist Gats: A glimpse behind the mask
While stickers can be found all over Portland, several specific walls around the city have become magnets for pasted-up poster art, such as the wall near Northeast 17th Avenue and Alberta Street, behind the Alberta Free Hutch, or on the north-facing side of Interurban, a bar on Mississippi Avenue.
These walls are often the staging grounds for ongoing feuds among street artists, with layers upon layers of posters, stickers and spray paint covering up previous layers of the same.
Skam’s anti-Trump and Pence effigies have become the target of a few so-called alt-righters who keep covering up or otherwise destroying his work, he said.
Another tagger regularly targets the work of female paste-up artists, covering their stickers and posters with misogynistic messaging. It’s no wonder he’s been cast out from the community.
Graffiti artists are also known to tag over paste-ups. Some see stickers and posters as a lower art form because they believe it’s less risky to quickly slap up a poster than it is to create art with paint. Today, however, there are few Portland graffiti artists who have developed their art beyond rudimentary tagging.
There are several reasons for this stagnation in Portland’s graffiti scene and the rise of stickers, stencils and posters in its place.
Conklin’s organization, the Portland Street Art Alliance, is a nonprofit that began as an advocacy group in 2012 to help artists understand Portland’s restrictive mural laws. In most cities, all artists need to do to legally paint a mural is get the property owner’s permission, but in Portland they need a permit.
The permit process is lengthy and arduous and requires multiple trips downtown to drop off paperwork and pick up signage. You can’t apply for the permit online. And while the current fee is $50, in the past it’s been more than $1,000, making it a barrier to many artists.
Portland also lacks any sort of “free wall,” Conklin said. These are designated areas where street artists are allowed to practice their craft without fear of prosecution.
Most larger cities offer these legal graffiti areas to artists, although they require resources for monitoring. There are seven such walls in the Seattle area, for example, according to online legal graffiti wall locator legal-walls.net.
Another factor was Portland Police Bureau’s graffiti abatement squad. The bureau had dedicated two full-time officers to investigating graffiti artists. They built felony cases, kicked down doors and made arrests.
One of the two graffiti investigators, Officer Anthony Zanetti, penned a letter to Portland City Council in 2012 that read:
“The most significant sign of our success has been the gradual decrease in graffiti written by our embedded, ‘old school’ ‘graffiti’ vandals and their ‘crews.’ The veteran writers that inspired a new crop of up and coming ‘taggers’ over the last six years, have dwindled over the last eight months due to arrests and prosecutions. The tone of the graffiti scene here in Portland is much more reserved, with many writers in the community distrustful of each other and fearful of arrest.”
Portland City Council had also cracked down on graffiti by passing a series of anti-graffiti measures still in place today, including a law requiring stores that sell spray paint or paint pens to check identification and record the names of anyone who purchases those items.
“That urge to put art into the street is going to be there whether we like it or not. It’s always been there throughout civilization, so once you start repressing one, something else is going to come up. I think that really pushed the sticker scene up and away,” Conklin said. “And then of course our weather. When it’s wet, you can’t paint.”
Skam said he’d heard he was on the graffiti officers’ radar a few years ago but never got busted. Anytime he’s had a run-in with police since, he’s been able to talk his way out of a citation.
Today, Portland’s street artists don’t have too much to fear.
Sgt. Chris Burley, a Portland police spokesperson, said the Graffiti Investigation Unit has not operated since 2015 due to staffing shortages.
“The Police Bureau at this time does not track taggers, tagger crews or people posting stickers unless there exists an extraordinary reason to do so,” Burley said in an email.
Because many sticker artists sell their stickers online or trade them with artists in other parts of the world, authorities would never know who stuck a particular sticker unless they caught the artist red-handed.
Even though the police can’t currently focus on tagging, the city is still investing resources in cleanup.
Portland’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement houses a Graffiti Abatement Program. And its budget tripled to $440,000 this fiscal year following an uptick in hate and political graffiti, which it considers top priority along with gang graffiti. This uptick included anti-Trump messaging, which accounted for nearly half of all hate and political graffiti.
The program focuses on removing graffiti from private property, free of charge to the owner, while referring graffiti on public property to the appropriate agency. Its program coordinator, Juliette Muracchioli, said that among the various government agencies that clean up graffiti and stickers, such as TriMet and PBOT, the cost is likely in the millions.
The program’s work had been complaint driven, but with its budget boost, Muracchioli said, her team can now be proactive. This means they will approach property owners to offer their graffiti removal services.
She said stickers become a problem when they are stuck to the front sides of street signs, but she admitted, “There are some really beautiful stickers out there.”
But, she said, “the thing about stickers is that it takes so long to remove them compared to painting and pressure washing. Even large wheat pastes that go up can be pressure-washed off really quickly, whereas stickers, even a really small one, takes almost the same amount of time if not longer to peel it off.”
As the battle between those putting up the stickers and those taking them down continues, street artists have a fairly new weapon in their arsenal: a special vinyl material called “Eggshell.”
It clings solidly to most clean surfaces and breaks into tiny pieces rather than peeling off, making it virtually impossible to remove, as Skam demonstrated with an eggshell sticker of a former pope stuck to a waste bin in his living room.
Muracchioli said the majority of stickers she sees are on public, not private, property.
Skam said respectable paste-up artists follow a set of guidelines, one of which is that you don’t put stickers or posters on private property unless the owner welcomes it, such as at a skate shop.
If that’s the case, Muracchioli said, the city wouldn’t move to enforce the graffiti laws unless it receives citizen complaints. Then they would try to work with the property owner to find a solution, such as a permitted mural.
“The process for us to enforce against property owners is so lengthy that it is rarely worth the staff time,” she said. “Our code requires that a warrant be drafted to gain permission onto the property to remove the graffiti and then lien that cost against the property.”
Conklin credits Muracchioli with being more understanding of the street art community and the benefits of public art than her predecessors at the city abatement program. And, she said, the Portland Street Art Alliance has also been in conversations with Commissioner Chloe Eudaly regarding potential changes to the city’s mural laws.
“Chloe gets it,” Conklin said.
On a warm August night about 10:30 p.m., Street Roots accompanied Skam and Kitska as they sticker bombed Northeast Alberta Street.
Kitska, whose artist name is inspired by her Ukrainian upbringing, carried her stickers in a little flip-pouch.
Neither covered their faces while sticker tagging, although they conceal their identities for photographs and when they’re pasting up large posters.
Kitska would look around before slapping up a sticker to ensure no one was watching. She said she’s making up for being such a square all her life. This is her little way of being rebellious.
Skam was less cautious in his approach, applying stickers right in front of pedestrians as they walked past. He carried with him a sawed-off Swiffer Sweeper he had customized into a sticker applicator – for reaching high places. He keeps a bucket full of his paste mixture and a couple of large paint brushes on hand in the trunk of his car.
He explained sometimes they use tricks to divert people’s attention away if they seem to take concern with their activities. They might point at something, yell someone’s name or pretend to know the person.
But on this particular evening, no one seemed to care when they saw a sticker being stuck. A few passers-by even smiled.
Artists often slap stickers next to their friends’ stickers to say hello. In some cases, a new artist will place a sticker alongside a better-known artist to get noticed. This is called “spot jockeying” or “side busting.”
Compared to Skam, Kitska is new to the scene.
Two years ago, she was a college-trained fine artist who hadn’t dabbled in street art but had been drawn to Skam’s work and began communicating with him online.
He invited her to join a group of Portland street artists in Seattle’s famous Post Alley (think gum wall) as they threw up posters one evening in November 2015.
“I had Googled ‘how to be a street artist.’ That’s how much of a dork I was,” Kitska said.
She showed up with a couple of “dinky” posters she had drawn and waited. She was about to leave when a group of about 15 masked artists descended on the alley.
“I’m standing there in this crowd of street artists, and they start pacing immediately, like piranhas on a corpse,” she said. “It was nuts.”
She has since created Kitska’s style around creatures and figures from her subconscious, she explained.
“Ever since I was little, I would have these dreams about these tall, long-necked flowing-haired, antlered figures,” she said. “And I never really knew what they were as a kid. They were comforting.”
Kitska said for her, creating paste-ups and stickers has become a form of art therapy.
“It’s how my heart connects to other people,” she said.
For Skam, it’s about the message, and he said the current presidential administration has given him plenty of fodder.
“Right now, everyone needs to be rebellious in their own way because of what’s going on politically in the world,” Skam said as he reached up and slapped a zombie Pence sticker onto the back of a street sign.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Portland's Graffiti Abatement Program categorizes anti-Trump graffiti as hate graffiti. It categorizes it as political graffiti. We regret the error.
Email staff reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
Follow the artists on Instagram
The street artists mentioned in this article can be found on social media:
Skam
PolarBear Stencils
Tenet
D7606
C3
Pyramid Oracle
Placebo Effect
Shepard Fairey
Yo909
Kitska
Dead Red
Wokeface
Kristadaggermouth
Satan's Spawn
Dr. Scott
Rx Skulls
Voxx Romana