In 2017, artist Richard Kraft embarked on two projects in response to the Trump presidency.

Kraft’s Ubu/Trump stickers appropriated (completely unedited) texts along with a woodcut image of Ubu from Alfred Jarry’s 1896 revolutionary play Ubu Roi which is an excoriating critique of the moronic in power.

Siglio has given away sets of stickers to Advocates and other friends of Siglio as well as at various book fairs, and now we’re making them available for free for wider dissemination.

You can download the Ubu/Trump pdf, print them out (on sticker paper!), and do send us photos of Ubu/Trump “in action.” There’s a small catalog of them here so you can see them posted in various places, not least of which is the side of an NYPD van (thank you, dear friend!).

We also reproduced them in The Improbable, No. 1: Time Indefinite, a free newsletter Siglio published in 2020.

The other Trump-related project by Richard Kraft is “It Is What It Is”: All the Cards Issued to Donald Trump, January 2017 – January 2021, a five-volume set of artist’s books that is “a real-time diary that’s a dazzling testament to its subject’s basic incomprehensibility.”
—Leah Ollman, Brookly Rail

Note: this was originally posted January 21, 2018 and has been updated multiple times, most recently on August 1, 2022.

Richard Krafttakes a multi-disciplinary approach (incorporating photography, video, collage, drawing and performance) as he seeks to construct environments and interrupt the world around us so that incongruities, paradoxes, and multiplicity of meaning might yield a new orientation to the familiar.

In April 2015 Siglio Press published Kraft’s artist’s book, Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, and he co-edited the first complete volume of John Cage’s Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) as well as My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight by Marcel Broodthaers, both for Siglio. Publications include BOMB, Bookforum, and Carousel among other journals, and in 2016 his work was featured in The New Collage Book, a comprehensive survey published by Gestalten.

Kraft has frequently made work for public spaces, with pieces appearing on the sides of buses and in library aisles, as well as for performances which have taken place in Oxford Circus and Speaker’s Corner in London, along the Las Vegas Strip, at the Wendover Air Force Base, outside “Little Sparta” in rural Scotland, and downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. In 2015, The City of West Hollywood (as part of the its thirtieth anniversary celebrations) commissioned Kraft to produce One Hundred Walkers, West Hollywood which received a Year in Review Award from Americans for the Arts/Public Art Network.

Exhibitions include the Charlie James Gallery, LA Louver, Rosamund Felsen and Greg Kucera, as well as museum, university and non-profit art spaces, including the Portland Art Museum, the Laguna Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Ruffin Gallery at the University of Virginia, Occidental College, and Printed Matter, among others. He lives and works in the Hudson River Valley, NY and Los Angeles.