An artist asked a company to stop using his work. They sued him.

Jordan Nickel, who goes by the artist name POSE, stands in front of his recently completed mural in Evanston. Photo Lea Pinsky

Giulia Blocal Riva, the Rome-based street art writer and author who has been running the independent blog BLocal Travel since 2011, recently published a piece exploring a persistent pattern of corporate entities co-opting street art for marketing purposes without paying artists. The essay was included in her substack Beyond the Walls about the role of AI in public art.

We explored the question of street art ownership in this piece for Observer last year. Giulia goes one step further to ask what legal protections exist for the intellectual property of street artists once they create works of art in the wild.

She looked at the case of Chicago artist Pose who was sued by Michaels after he tried to get them to stop using an image of his work in promoting a spray paint brand. She also looked at artist Ernest Zacharevic’s legal action against AirAsia, the dispute between Los Angeles–based artist Revok and global fashion retailer H&M, and the legal paradox surrounding Banksy’s work.

Her conclusion: “These episodes reveal how unstable the legal ground beneath street art truly is”

Here’s the latest outstanding piece from Guilia Blocal Riva:

An artist asked a company to stop using his work. They sued him.

Chicago muralist Jordan Nickel, known as Pose, recently discovered that one of his murals was being used on the website of the U.S. arts and crafts retailer Michaels to promote a spray paint brand sold by the company. According to the artist, he was never contacted, nor was any license requested or granted, despite the fact that the image appeared in a clearly commercial context tied directly to a product offering.

Rather than initiating a lawsuit or seeking financial damages, Nickel responded through his attorney with a cease-and-desist letter asking that the material be removed. It was a formal assertion of his rights over his work and likeness, and arguably the most measured step available to him under the circumstances.

The company’s response escalated the matter: Michaels filed a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgment that its use of the image did not infringe the artist’s rights, while also asking the court to require Nickel to cover its legal fees.

What makes this situation particularly unsettling is the profile of the corporation involved. Michaels is not an outsider to the creative ecosystem; its entire business model depends on artists, makers, designers, and independent creatives. It markets itself as a company for artists. Watching such a company respond to a takedown request with litigation introduces a contradiction that is difficult to ignore, not only because an artwork was allegedly used without permission, but because the escalation reframes a simple rights assertion as a legal confrontation.

When Brands Appropriate, Artists Push Back.

This is not the first time a corporation has attempted to use the work of a street artist for commercial purposes without consent. Last year, Ernest Zacharevic took legal action against AirAsia after the airline incorporated one of his murals into a promotional campaign without authorization. The artwork, originally created in Penang, was repurposed in marketing materials that clearly served the company’s brand positioning, turning a site-specific piece into a corporate asset.

I interviewed Ernest at the time to understand how the situation unfolded and why he chose to respond legally, and I added my own reflection on a recurring misconception: the idea that visibility in public space somehow weakens authorship (spoiler: it does not).

If you would like to revisit that conversation and editorial, you can read it here.

Street Art and Intellectual Property

The most widely publicized confrontation of this kind remains the dispute between Los Angeles–based artist Revok and global fashion retailer H&M. The company used one of Revok’s murals as the backdrop for an advertising campaign, effectively transforming a piece conceived for the urban landscape into a commercial visual asset.

When the artist objected, H&M’s initial legal argument went further than a simple defense of fair use. In its court filings, the company contended that because the mural had been painted without property authorization, it was not protected by copyright. The underlying claim was clear and deeply consequential: that an artwork created without formal permission might not qualify for intellectual property protection at all.

I have addressed this tension before in this newsletter, particularly in relation to Banksy and the legal paradox surrounding his work. In order to defend certain images, Banksy was forced to register them as trademarks rather than rely solely on copyright protection, since filing for copyright would have required disclosing his identity.

Ownership Under Pressure.

These episodes reveal how unstable the legal ground beneath street art truly is. Urban artworks exist at the intersection of anonymity, contested legality, authorship, and commercial value. They are created in public space, often outside traditional institutional frameworks, yet they circulate within a cultural economy that assigns them visibility, desirability, and monetary worth.

The dispute between Pose and Michaels, when placed alongside the cases of Zacharevic and Revok, does not read as an isolated misunderstanding. It reflects a recurring pattern in which corporations draw cultural capital from street art, translating its visual language into brand value, while questioning or resisting the legal claims of artists once those artists assert control over their work.

At the center of this pattern lies a deeper contradiction. Ownership, in theory, grants the author the right to control reproduction and commercial use. Yet when the simple act of asking a corporation to stop using one’s work can trigger litigation, ownership begins to look less like a stable guarantee and more like a principle that depends on who has the resources to enforce it.

This is where the imbalance becomes visible. A cease-and-desist letter is a formal mechanism designed to resolve disputes without escalating them. When such a letter is met with a lawsuit, the conversation shifts from rights to endurance: who can sustain legal costs, who can absorb reputational pressure, who can afford to fight.

For a corporation whose business model relies on the purchasing power and loyalty of creatives, this tension carries symbolic weight. A company that presents itself as serving artists cannot treat the assertion of authorship as a threat. If it does, it risks undermining the very ecosystem on which it depends.

What these conflicts ultimately expose is that ownership in the context of street art is not only a legal matter. It is a question of power, recognition, and the structural conditions under which creative labor is valued or dismissed.