Friday, February 6, 2009

Posterboy



When I was in New York last year I saw a whole bunch of these collages with the ads that were in the subway. My actual photos are right below this. I thought this was just the work of bored passengers as they waited for the train, but at the same time they were waaay too awesome to have been just randomly done.


found in Greenpoint, Brooklyn



It has now been revealed to me that this work was done by an art student who goes by the name Posterboy and that link send you to his flick account! What I had found was merely a smattering of the quality of work Posterboy usually creates!

New York Times says this: "While most other street or graffiti artists concentrate on adding their own imagery, illegally, to parts of the subway system, Poster Boy, a kind of anti-consumerist Zorro with a razor blade, a sense of humor and a talent for collage, has made his outlaw presence known all over the city by cutting and pasting the images that are already there in the form of ads."

Now it seems that Posterboy has been getting so much publicity, that he has been nabbed the the coppers. In a recent New York Times article they continued:

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"But his stealth campaign, which has entertained thousands of normally glassy-eyed commuters and infuriated the police and the companies whose costly ads he has chopped up and scrambled, will probably get a lot harder now. At an art event in SoHo on Saturday, a group of plainclothes New York City police officers finally caught up to and unmasked, at least metaphorically, the man they say is Poster Boy.

“He is Henry Matyjewicz, a 27-year-old who lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and he was found after a tip from someone who saw the name Poster Boy on a flier for the event, the police said.”

In a truly fitting and ambiguous nature, perhaps they got the wrong guy. “But a man identifying himself as ‘Henry,’ who called The New York Times on Tuesday in response to messages for Poster Boy sent through friends, cast some existential doubt on whether Mr. Matyjewicz was, in fact, the man the police were after. ‘Henry is one of many individuals who believe in the Poster Boy movement,’ the man wrote later on Tuesday in an e-mail message, referring to Mr. Matyjewicz in the third person. ‘Henry’s part is to do legal artwork while propagating the ideas behind Poster Boy. That’s why it was O.K. for him to take the fall the other night.' He added, 'Henry Matyjewicz is innocent.’”

“On Tuesday Poster Boy said that Mr. Matyjewicz’s arrest meant only good things for Poster Boy. ‘More awareness,’ he wrote in the e-mail interview. ‘More support. Outdoor advertising, a blight that can’t be ignored, will become illegal.’”
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this is true professionalism in street art, the way I see it!

some additional info from Juxtapoz

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