eddie colla

Eddie attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and graduated from the California College of Arts with a BFA in photography/interdisciplinary fine arts in 1991. He began his artistic career as a photographer, working first for the New York Times and later countless magazines, record labels and ad agencies. 15 years later he has morphed into one who counters the all-pervasive nature of
commercialism in public spaces.


Since 2005, his wheat-pastes and stencils can be found throughout public spaces in the U.S., France, Hong Kong, Thailand Cambodia and China. Eddie's work first began to garner national recognition when his street art began incorporating images of Barack Obama throughout the 2008 Presidential election. His growing popularity landed him attention on internet blogs, features in six published books, and participation in the "Manifest Hope Art Gallery" shows at the 2008 Democratic National Convention and at the Presidential Inauguration in Washington D.C. His designs have been transformed many times over, from stickers, album and magazine covers.


Of his work Eddie states, “Some people view what I do as vandalism. I assume that their objection is that I alter the landscape without permission. Advertising perpetually alters our environment without the permission of its inhabitants. The only difference is that advertisers pay for the privilege to do so and I don’t. So if you’re going to call me anything, it is more accurate to call me a thief.” His work has been featured alongside Hush, Blek Le Rat, Shepard Fairey, Banksy, Keith Haring, and Kaws in the Indoor Mural show at 941 Geary in San Francisco, the Arts Fund Expo at Art Basel Miami and Digard's "Urban Contemporary Art" Auction in Paris. In August of 2011, Eddie completed an 80 ft mural in Little Saigon San Francisco chronicling the Vietnamese Diaspora. In 2012 Eddie participated in Pow Wow Hawaii and created an all encompassing post-apocalyptic installation with D Young V and Hugh Leeman at Hold -Up Gallery in Los Angeles.


Eddie took on the role of curator at lOAKal gallery in Oakland CA in December of 2012 thru 2015. In 2013 Eddie worked closely on collaborations with D Young V creating several large scale public mural projects and a 2 man installation "Memento Mori" in San Rafael CA. His curating extended to Ian Ross Gallery in San Francisco where he curated "Made in China" a group exhibition where contemporary artists had their work hung side by side with counterfeits produced in an oil painting factory in China. He has completed collaborative murals with D Young V, Joachim Romain and Jean Jerome. 2017-2018 3 solo exhibitions were produced, “Inviolable” in Paris and 2 installation projects; “Enumeration" in Detroit and “Memorandum” in Paris. Spending the majority of his time abroad, Eddie also Created murals for “Strokar inside”, “Kingspray”,  “Le mur Oberkampf”, “Le Mur Marseille” and “84 Amelot”. In 2020 Eddie organized “Carpe Diem solidaire” a 24 hour online event, in which 150 artists from 5 continents work simultaneously during lock down. The artists live-all streamed the works they were creating and the works were sold to raise €35,000 for the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale during the COVID 19 crisis. 2022-23 Eddie spent time working in Cambodia, Thailand and Mexico.

His work has also been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post and the Chicago Tribune and over a dozen books. Eddie currently lives and works in Paris.

Read about the "Lest We Forget" body of work...

Lest We Forget

I had a friend once who was convinced she could change her past more than her future, just by forgetting. That recollection was my starting point. This exhibition is an examination of what I thought a post covid world would be (from the point of view of lockdown) and what it has been. I began by reimagining characters I had created prior to the pandemic, characters who seemed to be in the midst of something catastrophic, like the pandemic. However, when I first imagined these characters, their dignity was inviolable; they were resilient and almost immutable in the face of adversity. Now, in 2024, they re-emerge. They are recognizable for the most part, but they are not the same. Their forms are incomplete, they have gaping voids replaced by shadow and silhouette. Details are replaced by rudimentary sketches, and memories of parts which are no longer present. They have been fractured and reassembled.

I have struggled to understand how the life I lived in 2019 has never simply resumed where it left off. The time I've spent in the studio recently was an effort to understand this. For the first time in many years, these works were made without the consideration of an audience. They were made as a part of my examination, and their existence is a derivation of that process.

As much as I have told myself: our masks are off, we can shake hands, hug and trust – I find I have arrived in an environment that is in many ways more isolating, more fractured, and more polarized than the world I closed my apartment door on in 2020. While the anxiety of the pandemic is all but gone, the disassociation remains. The light hearted and casual acquaintances I once had are now, potentially, hard lined allies or enemies. Those amicable disagreements and debates have been replaced by extreme and cemented positions. There is a under current of tension that lies beneath the surface of many seemingly inconsequential social interactions. It feels like dancing on thin ice.

This is life in a post-truth world; where we are inundated with information and disinformation, where the structures and institutions that we once looked to as arbiters of the truth are either behind pay walls, or the subject of conspiracy theories. It's a natural progression. When you can no longer tell what is fact and what is fiction, then everyone and everything is suspect. The characters in these images are mired in alpha numeric strands. These strands are all the same 5 sequences. I chose to do this because repetition creates the illusion of credibility. Hence, if you repeat the same lie enough, it becomes the truth. Even if this is some cryptic code that you don't understand, the pattern is recognized. In a post-truth world, all patterns are suspect.

We also seem to have exited the pandemic at about the same time as technology decide to determine that humans were becoming obsolete. That, indeed, the miserable tasks of folding laundry, filing taxes, and taking out the trash would continue to require your participation. However, art and literature and music, and all the things that are a respite to the tedium of modern life, can now be made without you. All the knowledge of 10,000 years had been fed to a silicon wafer that is now bigger, better, and smarter than you.

While we all sat home, mostly alone, questioning our life choices during the pandemic and vowing to reprioritize, re-evaluate and live our best lives, those aspirations evaporated quickly under the increased financial pressures of housing insecurity and manufactured inflation.

Throughout this period, the climate crisis has also been chugging along as an existential threat that remains to be adequately addressed. We are literally sitting on our hands while the world becomes less and less inhabitable.

And – as if right on cue – every crisis has an autocratic despot waiting in the wings with promises: to quell your fear, to fix everything and, of course, to find a scapegoat to blame. Hate is an effective tool to distract people from a world view, and force them to focus on the “other” across the border or down the street. This is the post pandemic world we arrived in and it is not 2019. All the while, H5N1 is sitting in the shadows posing an even greater (potentially) threat than Covid-19, while politicians argue about transgender bathrooms and immigration. It's as if we have learned nothing.

This body of work was a way for me to spend some time alone, creating and considering all the voids that still exist as way for me to understand myself and what others might be experiencing. While the pandemic has ended, the implications of it have not. Despite the normalcy of day to day life, there are subtle things at play here that continue to keep many of us guarded and isolated, and prevent us from re-establishing the connections that existed in 2019.

The prices of the pieces in this exhibit are all numeric palindromes; sequences that are the same in forward and reverse. This was a simple way for me to express that we had started a sequence of events, ill prepared and over confident, and quickly reverted to a previous level of arrogance. I.E: a numeric sequence that changes and simply reverts. The sequence literally follows the same deviation in reverse to arrive back where it began. It's a loop.

There seems a collective sense of exhaustion that has been exploited and has divided people. Overwhelmed, there are increasing undertones of resignation. In our haste to move on, we have failed to address some critical effects of this pandemic. I have no intention of ending this diatribe with some overly optimistic platitude or some superficial remedy. I am simply observing it.

Eddie Colla


The Stain of Vacant Angels

A fifth (of the way) into a new century,

there were warnings.

We watched a pandemic rip through our entire civilization

and bring the world to a screeching halt.

We read the papers,

wished and waited.

We longed.

We tried to unite, with exceptional failure.

We counted our dead without properly mourning.

We put our friends and families in refrigerators.

We hid our consequences.

We blamed and pointed fingers.

We fought for all the wrong remedies.

Like children, we fought and threw temper tantrums.

Parts of us died – the good parts.

Time stopped.

This had never happened to us before,

and likely might not again.

We thought.

Parts of us were cut off, and have not grown back.

We buried the victims,

and carried around the resentment of our financial losses.

This went on for years.

We were unprepared for eventualities.

It wasn't cost effective.

Failures can be opportunities,

should you learn from them.

One day on the west coast of America,

the sun never came up.

We had actually stopped tomorrow from coming.

We stared into the red sky, slack jawed and awe struck.

Staring our death in the face.

In that darkness, the weight of consequence was crushing.

The sun eventually returned,

and the pandemic subsided.

We went back to jobs we hate.

We started our cars.

Began removing people from their homes,

and let children go hungry again.

Today, there are millions of birds flying over head

with a pathogen that's in our food.

In our milk,

in our carbon dense air and contaminated water.

And we lumber forward, talking of growth and scale.

With amnesia,

having learned nothing.

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