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Robbie Conal (born 1944) is an American guerrilla poster artist noted for his gnarled, grotesque depictions of U.S. political figures of note. A former hippie, he is noted for distributing his poster art throughout a city overnight using his "volunteer guerrilla postering army". Conal grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. Raised by union organizers who considered the major art museums to be day care centers for him, he spent his formative years immersing himself in art history at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other great local art institutions of New York City. He attended High School of Music and Art, and later received his BFA at San Francisco State University (1969), and his Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University (1978). He moved to the Los Angeles area in 1984, where he currently resides. In 1986, angered by the Reagan Administration’s rabid abuse of political power in the name of representative democracy, he began making satirical oil portraits of politicians and bureaucrats and turning them into street posters. He gradually developed an irregular guerrilla army of volunteers, who helped him poster the streets of major cities around the country. Over the past 24 years, Robbie has made more than 80 street posters satirizing politicians from both political parties, televangelists and global capitalists. He has also taken on subjects like censorship, war, social injustice, and environmental issues. Robbie is considered one of the country’s foremost satirical street poster artists. His influence is so great that The Atlantic once dubbed him "the grand old dude of wheat-paste-poster snipping." His work has been featured on “CBS This Morning”, “Charlie Rose” and in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the LA Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, People Magazine, Interview, and the Washington Post—which dubbed him, “America’s foremost street artist”. He’s 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 (COLA). 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 directed by filmmaker Clay Walker. 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. Most recently, his work has been collected by – and featured in exhibitions at – LACMA and MOCA in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Art, and his beloved hometown favorite, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Other prestigious venues that have exhibited Conal's work include the D.C. Art Center in Washington, D.C., the Hammer Museum of Los Angeles, the Center For Contemporary Art in Sacramento, the San Jose Museum of Art in San Jose, CA, the WIlliam Benton Museum of Art in Storrs, CT, Reed College Art Gallery in Portland, OR, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art in Cleveland, OH, Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, and SF MOMA in San Francisco, He has authored three books: Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla Poster Artist, 1992 (HarperCollins); Artburn, 2003 (Akashic Books), and , with wife Deborah Ross, 2009 (Art Attack Press). He currently resides in Los Angeles, CA, where he is an adjunct professor of painting and drawing at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts. Contact
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