New York Magazine profiles the Ace Hotel in New York’s Midtown South where artist Michael Anderson has created a mural out of his collection of graffiti stickers, said to be the world’s largest:

The collection now numbers at least 40,000—a testament to the sheer number of graffiti stickers, which are so ubiquitous in New York as to be nearly invisible, the visual equivalent of a honking taxi horn. For years, they sat quietly in notebooks in the artist’s Upper West Side apartment. Last April, the owners of the new Ace Hotel at 29th and Broadway came calling with a mural commission. Completed last month, it’s most likely the only museum devoted to this extremely ephemeral form.

Consisting of 4,000 or so stickers scanned from Anderson’s notebooks, printed in black-and-white on silk paper, and assembled into a dense collage, the mural evokes both the Giuliani years and a grittier, preboom downtown. “I think of myself more like the curator rather than the artist,” Anderson says, standing in the Ace lobby. As a curator and collector, he took an egalitarian approach: The mural contains stickers by well-known graffiti-ers like Barry McGee (who tagged as Twist) and Steve Powers (ESPO), as well as those of the unknown and untalented.

Peel Slowly and See (New York Magazine)