Robbie Conal Interview

Robbie Conal met the LAFCO team in the parking lot of the Rose Cafe in Venice, California. Robbie discussed his experience with political art as he wheat-pasted three of his posters on the van.

Robbie Conal is an American guerilla poster artist noted for his gnarled, grotesque depictions of U.S. political figures of note. A former hippie, he is noted for his use of snipes to distribute his poster art throughout a city overnight.

Conal's parents were both union organizers, and he grew up in Manhattan. He received his bachelor's degree in fine arts from San Francisco State University in 1968 and his MFA from Stanford University in 1978. He moved to the Los Angeles area in 1984, where he currently resides. Conal is an Adjunct Professor of Painting & Drawing at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts.

Conal's work has been featured in numerous publications, including Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, as well as CBS's This Morning and Charlie Rose. He was the subject of the 1992 documentary Post No Bills. He has also written two books, Art Attack: The Midnight Politics Of A Guerrilla Artist and Artburn, a collection of his work published in the alternative newspaper L.A. Weekly. He has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Getty Trust.

In 2004, Conal joined artists Shepard Fairey and Mear One to create a series of "anti-war, anti-Bush" posters for a street art campaign called "Be the Revolution" for the art collective Post Gen.