Street artists have found themselves in legal conflicts for years with fashion brands and other companies that employ their work in advertising and social media campaigns. Some have won settlements after legal battles with these companies, which claim they do not need to contact the artists for their works, which often appear in public and sometimes are created illegally.
Now, Chicago artist Jordan Nickel, who goes by the moniker Pose, finds himself in a legal conflict with arts and crafts retail chain Michaels, which he says used his artworks in its advertisements without his permission. The company is pushing back on a cease-and-desist request it received last month from his attorney, Los Angeles intellectual property lawyer Jeff Gluck, who says that the company’s use of Nickel’s work in its ads infringed the artist’s rights, and is threatening legal action.
“A company built for artists choosing to sue a prominent artist who was just trying to enforce his intellectual property rights in good faith is astonishingly egregious and problematic,” Gluck told ARTnews via email. Gluck says the company filed its complaint in bad faith, to intimidate and bully the artist, adding, “A ‘company for artists’ will never survive if it does not understand or respect the value of the creative work generated by its own customers.”
Founded in 1973, Michaels, which hauls in billions annually, bills itself as “North America’s largest provider of arts, crafts, framing, floral, décor, and merchandise for makers and do-it-yourself home decorators.” It operates over 1,300 stores across the U.S. and in Canada, and owns Artistree, a framing company. It is named for Michael J. Dupey, whose father bought a five-and-dime in Dallas in 1968 and made him manager. He changed the store’s focus to arts and crafts and built it into a chain.
After Gluck made the artist’s position known, the company fired back with a lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division (where the company is headquartered), on February 3, saying that Michaels’ conduct does not infringe Nickel’s “alleged intellectual property rights” and calling his claims “meritless.” Gluck also objects to the venue for the suit, saying the artist has no relationship to Texas.
Jordan Nickel, aka Pose, Stripes (2014).
For its part, the company says that it was advertising products from Australian company AVT Paints, which markets Ironlak spray paint. Michaels says that Nickel provided an image of his Pose tag to AVT in 2014, and it claims AVT represented that the company had a sponsorship agreement in place that allowed it to use his work.
“Based on its communications with AVT Paints and the images of POSE’s artwork on Ironlak’s website,” says the complaint, “Michaels understood it had permission or a license to use POSE’s artwork in the marketing of Ironlak spray paint.” It also says Nickel has failed to demonstrate his own copyright for the work. All the same, the store removed the artwork from its displays after its conversation with Gluck.
Via Dallas attorneys Munsch Hardt Kopf and Harr, Michaels is asking the court to declare that the company did not infringe, and is asking the court to award it attorneys’ fees and expenses.
Gluck, who founded his firm in 2016, claims to have recovered millions of dollars for his artist clients. In 2018, he represented street artist Jason Williams, aka Revok, in a dispute with fashion giant H&M, which had published advertisements featuring a model in front of one of his murals. The house claimed the artist had no rights because the murals were illegal, but ultimately, following a months-long battle, inked a settlement—after numerous artists rallied to Williams’s defense, including KAWS, who published a drawing of a tombstone bearing H&M’s name, which producer and art collector Swizz Beatz posted on social media.
Artnet News profiled Gluck the following year, saying he had filed dozens of lawsuits on artists’ behalf, and settled hundreds of cases ahead of litigation. Nickel was already represented by Gluck back then, calling him a “godsend.”
