Rebellion in the Streets:
A Celebration of Street Art and Punk

curated by Tamara White, Ph.D.

Bader + Simon is pleased to present Rebellion in the Streets: A Celebration of Street Art and Punk, featuring artists that span decades of powerful and expressive murals that push against the status quo while provoking innovative thought and dialogue. Street art and punk, on an international scale, are in alignment with the mission of Bader + Simon with fearless activism that, we hope, continues to inspire a new generation of artists and activists.

Cey Adams

Cey Adams, a New York City native, emerged from the downtown graffiti movement to exhibit alongside fellow artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He appeared in the historic 1982 PBS documentary Style Wars which tracks subway graffiti in New York. As the Creative Director of hip hop mogul Russell Simmons’ Def Jam Recordings, he co-founded the Drawing Board, the label’s in-house visual design firm, where he created visual identities, album covers, logos, and advertising campaigns for Run DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Notorious B.I.G., Maroon 5, and Jay-Z.

His practice involves dismantling various imagery and paper elements to build multiple layers of color, texture, shadow, and light. Cey draws inspiration from 60’s pop art, sign painting, comic books, and popular culture. His work focuses on themes including pop culture, race and gender relations, cultural and community issues.

Appleton

Appleton (Artworks) is an artist and photographer who has been creating art, images and sculptures all of his life.

After surviving a diabetic coma at the age of six, Appleton began to collect almost every insulin bottle that has gone through his system, amounting to hundreds of bottles, faded syringes and old blood strips.

Appleton wants to inspire the millions who have diabetes--to carry on and realize that you are not alone in this daily battle.

In hopes of preventing naive misconceptions and harmful falsehoods to continue, he promises to educate the unknowing, asking them to learn more about this devastating disease.

Through his art, Appleton seeks to raise and spread awareness. By putting his message on the streets, he asks passersby to wonder what they see, what they are looking at….something over 30 million American diabetics look at everyday.

Michael Coppage

Michael Coppage is originally from Chicago, Ill and now resides in Cincinnati Ohio. He studied at Memphis College of Art and obtained a BFA degree with an emphasis in sculpture. He continued his education and obtained an MFA degree from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts(PAFA) with an emphasis in sculpture and mixed media.

Gee Horton

Gee Horton is a self-taught artist residing in Cincinnati, Ohio. Gee's studio practice is centered around his photorealistic drawings. He leverages his Masters of Social Work from University of Louisville, combined with lived experiences to explore the human form through his works.

Gee made his solo debut into the contemporary art world with his 2021 award-winning gallery exhibit “Coming of Age Chapter I – In Search of Self…Identity.” Taking place at the prestigious Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in downtown Cincinnati, the hyper-realistic charcoal and graphite portraits invited visitors to explore the beauty and complexities of modern adolescence. The solo exhibit demonstrates Gee’s immersive, multi-dimensional artwork that examines personal identity, objectification of the Black body, the cultural impact of contemporary media, and his search for ancestral connection, as well as the prevention of innocence.

Toby Mott

Toby Mott was born in London in 1964. He lives and works in Westminster.

Mott is an artist renowned for his contributions to punk visual culture. With a career spanning several decades, his work explores themes of rebellion, counterculture, deviance and transgression through a range of mediums including painting, publishing and installation. In the early 1980s Mott co-founded the Grey Organisation, an East London art collective who opposed the stagnant status quo of the establishment. The influential work of the Grey Organisation, including the infamous Cork Street attack, has been credited with reinvigorating art’s potential for subversion and critique. During this period Mott also appeared in a number of arthouse films by British director Derek Jarman, memorably The Angelic Conversation in 1985.

Relocating to the United States in the late 1980s, Mott collaborated with renowned musical artists such as A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy. Notably, he created the cover artwork for De La Soul’s breakthrough album, “3 Feet High and Rising”, regarded as an iconic album cover in hip-hop history.
In the late 1990s Mott launched the fashion line Toby Pimlico. The brand’s detention line slogan tees based on his artwork captured a zeitgeist of pithy pop rebellion and swiftly became a British cult classic.

More recently, Mott has established the international publishing fair Cultural Traffic, a platform for social change through DIY practice. Coming of age in the epicentre of punk, Mott began collecting posters, flyers and fanzines from punk’s inception. This early ad hoc archiving developed into The Mott Collection, an expansive personal archive of British subcultural ephemera which grew to encompass new wave, post punk, Northern Irish punk, anarcho-punk, skinhead, new romantic, warehouse, sound system, queer, acid house, rave and jungle. This unique collection has served as the basis of several acclaimed publications and exhibitions.

Technique2012

Technique2012 is a Cincinnati-based, self-described street artist rebranding America in his own version.

Having grown up watching movies and being engrossed in the cinematic glare of the big screen heroes and heroines, the goal is to translate that feeling to every wall so the viewer can relive their own celluloid dreams from their past. A period when times were less chaotic and more carefree but with a twist of modern dark humor that dives a bit deeper than the Titanic did.