Poster Boy (street Artist) - Work

Work

"At first, it was just something to keep me occupied while waiting on the subway." “I was playing with the posters, cutting them up" (he carried a razor used at work) and discovered that unlike the cardboard posters in the subway trains, the advertising posters on the subway platforms were printed on a self-adhesive material that could be stuck back down after being torn or cut out. He began to play with available images and text to create humorous “mash-ups” of advertisements. In 2008 alone he has created over 200 manipulated underground posters in NYC subway. He compares the creation of poster “mash-ups” to hip hop "freestyling" on a microphone. He does not have preconceived notions of what the work will be (“I don’t have anything planned…go there, see something, get inspired and do the work”), but uses the available images, often in a way that relates to current events. One commentator noted: "The pieces generally have a critical edge to them, making comments on the state of society and on the advertisements themselves." This can be explicitly political (as his pieces on Sean Bell, "IRAN = NAM", "Obama Drama," and Gaza), or a more general send up of celebrity and corporate culture.

Poster Boy has been called the "Matisse of subway-ad mash-ups," “a kind of anti-consumerist Zorro with a razor blade,” and “an anti-consumerist guerilla artist.” Culture reporter Ben Walters has said of his work "Poster Boy's work straddles two boisterous artistic subcultures: street art and culture jamming." Poster Boy has said of his technique “No matter what I do to the piece, as long as I did something to those advertisements and that saturation, it’s political. It’s anti-media, anti–established art world.”

He calls his work “A social thing, as opposed to being an artist making things for bored rich people to hang above their couch.” Besides the message of the individual piece, the aspect of producing anonymous public art that other people could do is part of the work. In a video interview he has said of his work “I want it to be free of copyright and free of authorship, as much as possible.” “The overall goal for Poster Boy is to inspire others. I'd love to see people take up the Poster Boy model and create change within their environment.” As his fame has grown, others have begun to emulate the technique. Whether these are unconnected individuals copying one original artist, or part of the "Poster Boy model" or "movement" has not been publicly confirmed.

His work is transitive (usually ripped down by MTA employees) but recorded in photographs. Photos of most of his work put up on the Poster Boy photostream on the Flickr photo sharing website.

Poster Boy has collaborated with Aakash Nihalani, a street artist who uses brightly colored electrical tape to create geometric patterns, and has worked on large outdoor monochrome pieces covering illegal NPA billboards with Jordan Seiler of the Public Ad Campaign.

His work had recently grown in scale, and recently he has applied his technique to large billboards. He seems to have been unaware of the somewhat similar and earlier billboard work of the UK group Cutup.

In March 2009, a major installation of subway advertising by the Museum of Modern Art at the Atlantic / Pacific subway stop in Brooklyn, consisting just of reproductions of works shown in MOMA, was doctored by what was claimed to be "the mysterious Poster Boy collective" along with Doug Jaeger of thehappycorp, The cutups included part of a goodyear tire appearing to be floating with Monet's waterlilies.

The initial Poster Boy work was all illicit, and he claimed “I don’t want to make any money off of it. I don’t want to bring it into the galleries.”. However, after his arrest in January 2009 his work has been shown in galleries, including a one-person show in Eastern District Brooklyn, April 3–26, 2009. He was also included in the group show, Razors, Tape, Glass, at Jajo Gallery in Newark New Jersey. This move has been criticized in the street art blogs.