Catherine Tedford
Catherine Tedford is a curator, writer, and collector who has spent more than three decades working at the intersection of art, activism, and print culture. From 1989 to 2026, she served as Director of the Richard F. Brush Art Gallery at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where she shaped its exhibition and collections programs into a hub for cross-disciplinary inquiry. Along the way, she built a thoroughly respectable institutional career around small adhesive slips of paper and vinyl designed to question authority and provoke debate.
Tedford is a leading researcher of political stickers, a subject she has pursued since the early 2000s. Through her blog Stickerkitty and the open access Street Art Graphics digital archive she created with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Council of Independent Colleges, she has documented and catalogued thousands of stickers from around the world. Her work traces the medium from the “silent agitators” of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early twentieth century, a particular scholarly passion, through to today’s stickers of protest, commentary, and critique.
Her essays and articles have appeared in Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture (PM Press); The Social Movement Archive (Litwin Books); Stickers, Volume 2: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art (Rizzoli); Printmaking Today; Weave News; and Slap Me Baby Zine. She has presented her research at conferences across the United States and Europe and is a two-time recipient of faculty research grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Paper Bullets: 120 Years of Political Stickers from Around the World
SKU: 9798887442266
Editor: Catherine Tedford
Series: PM Press
ISBN: 9798887442266
Published: 12/15/2026
Format: Paperback
Size: 6 x 9
Pages: 256
Subjects: Art & Politics, Public Art, Activism
Praise
“Over the last ten years, I’ve met some great kooks—ones who are experts on an extremely specific sticker-related topic or history. Catherine Tedford, a brilliant academic nerd gone to eleven, writes about political activism and looks at how and why the sticker medium is such an effective tool within that arena.”
—DB Burkeman, author of Stickers: Stuck-Up Piece of Crap: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art
“Stickers have always done what other media can’t—they show up uninvited, say what needs to be said, and refuse to leave. Paper Bullets is a serious, deeply researched, and genuinely infectious account of how a cheap piece of adhesive paper became one of the most effective political tools in history. Catherine Tedford has been obsessing over this stuff longer than almost anyone, and it shows.”
—Oliver Baudach, founder and director of Hatch Kingdom Sticker Museum, Berlin
“Catherine Tedford’s Paper Bullets is exactly the kind of book you would expect Catherine to make: ambitious, obsessive, detailed, and driven by a genuine love of sticker culture. What might seem like a niche subject in someone else’s hands becomes, in Catherine’s, a fascinating story of politics, art, public space, and street culture. By bringing together contributors who you might think have no business sharing the same pages, Paper Bullets captures the many worlds that exist together through stickering. The result is mind blowing. Read it.”
—Sterling “SEAZ” Downey, founder Under Pressure Annual Graffiti Festival, Montréal
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