National craft giant Michaels has hauled Chicago muralist Jordan Nickel – better known in street-art circles as POSE – into federal court in Texas after a fight over a single photo turned into a full-blown legal brawl.
At the center of the dispute is an image of Nickel spraying paint that appeared on Michaels’ product page promoting Ironlak spray paint. Nickel sent a cease-and-desist letter on Jan. 5 demanding that the retailer pull the image. Instead of quietly moving on, Michaels filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in federal court in Texas, asking a judge to declare that the company did not infringe the artist’s rights.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Nickel spotted a photo of his arm spraying Ironlak acrylic paint that appeared in an online sale listing for the product, running from June through early January. The lawsuit says Michaels leaned on a 2014 sponsorship arrangement between Nickel and Ironlak’s maker, AVT Paints, and that AVT told Michaels it had a “longstanding relationship” with the artist. Based on that, Michaels is seeking a declaratory judgment in Texas that it has not infringed Nickel’s property rights…