Stephen Powers - Everything is Shit Except You Love (Scarce original First Edition), 2009

Stephen Powers - Everything is Shit Except You Love (Scarce original First Edition), 2009

Silkscreen in twelve (12) colors on archival paper.
Pencil signed and numbered on the front
Printed by: Pictures on Walls printmaker, with blind stamp and edition number
Extremely rare, early (2009) silkscreen with 12 colors on archival art paper - pencil signed and numbered 161 from the limited edition of only 200 with publishers' chop mark. This particular design is especially elusive as it is the very First Edition of Powers' iconic "Everything is Shit" series, originally published in 2009.
It also bears the printers' blind stamp with the hand written edition number.

About Stephen Powers
A Fulbright scholar who has been awarded many public commissions and exhibited in major institutions like the Brooklyn Museum.... Born and raised in Philadelphia’s Overbrook neighborhood, Stephen Powers (b. 1968, Philadelphia) moved to New York in 1994, where he gained attention as the publisher of On the Go magazine and the author of the graffiti history The Art of Getting Over. In 1997, Powers undertook an ambitious and far-reaching graffiti campaign of his own, using the official-sounding acronym ESPO (Exterior Surface Painting Outreach) to deflect attention from the illegality of his activities. By 1999, he had covered dozens of storefront grates with giant silver block lettering. Powers gave up street graffiti the following year to concentrate on studio-based projects.
Powers’s work typically fuses word and image in paintings and graphics that evoke the bright look of a handmade bodega and fairground signage while reflecting the artist’s playful sense of humor. In 2005, he curated The Dreamland Artists Club, commissioning more than forty-five artists to repaint signage in Coney Island. As a 2007 Fulbright Scholar, Powers teamed up with local teenagers to create public works in Dublin and Belfast; the latter inspired in part by the city’s tradition of political murals. More recently, he collaborated on A Love Letter for You, in which he and a twenty-artist crew transformed a stretch of West Philadelphia into an open valentine with a series of romantic messages.

"I used to write graffiti, and graffiti is boiling down your whole life into one word, then repeating that word in as many ways as you can, until the word fills years like the days on a calendar. When I stopped writing graffiti and started making art, I went from one word to the rest of them. Words are good but people don’t read anymore — witness the proliferation of emojis as a language. Emojis can only say so much, so I combine word and image to depict the entire world. I make paintings like they were originally made, in a dark cave by a person with limited resources and a need to record what is compelling him to be told. I have more resources and data at my disposal, but it’s still dark, and I’m still compelled to draw the light." - Stephen Powers