Robbie’s Bio
Robbie 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).
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 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).
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. 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.
