Poster Boy (street artist)

Poster Boy is a decentralized group of vandals. Since the beginning, Poster Boy has remained anonymous and refuse to sell or sign any original work. The collective's work focuses the principles of Hip Hop, specifically the element of Graffiti, by limiting almost all work to improvisation. Using only a razor blade, Poster Boy creates satiric collage-like works created by cutting out sections of the self-adhesive advertisement posters in the platforms of New York City Subway stations, and pasting them back in different positions. Poster Boy is also referred to a 'Poster Boy movement' where other people produce similar unsigned work in the New York City subways imitating this original artist. Even after their first arrest, of Brooklyn resident Henry Matyjewicz, the collective remains active online and on the streets.

One of Poster Boy's work is featured in Banksy's 2010 documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop.

Poster Boy's work was also included in the retrospective street art show "10 Years of Wooster Collective" at Jonathan Levine Gallery in 2013.

"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."

...
Wikipedia