Robbie Conal

Painter and Prominent Street Artist

"In my street art I try to tickle regular people into thinking along with me about social and political issues I care about. My operative principle is: apply what you do best to what you care about most."

Biography

Born in 1944 in New York City, Robbie Conal grew up with parents who were both union organizers, and attended the High School of Music and Art. He moved to San Francisco in 1963, where he was an original hippie, and earned his BFA from San Francisco State and later his MFA from Stanford. In 1984 he moved to Los Angeles. Angered by the Reagan administration, Conal made satirical posters of politicians and bureaucrats who, by his standards, had abused their power. He developed a guerrilla army of volunteers, putting posters up in the streets of major cities around the country. Since then, Conal has made close to 100 posters satirizing politicians from both parties, televangelists, and global capitalists. He has also taken on censorship, the Supreme Court, and environmental issues.

Conal has gained national prominence as the country's premiere guerrilla political poster artist. The Washington Post has called him “America’s foremost street artist,” and his work has been featured on CBS This Morning and Charlie Rose and in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, People, Interview, and more. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns 12 of his prints, and he has received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant, a Getty Individual Artist Grant, and a Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Individual Artist's Grant. Conal taught painting and drawing at USC for 12 years and lives in Los Osos with his wife, Deborah Ross, a movie, TV, and print designer, and their cats Ella and Louie.