Jamie Reid/Supreme
British artist and radical activist Jamie Reid was born in 1947 and raised in Croydon, South London. Reid’s family was politically conscious and spiritually engaged, and his parents brought their children to nuclear disarmament and anti-apartheid rallies. “My grandfather and Scottish father were Druids and that was instilled in me alongside a socialist and anarchic background,” said Reid. ''It's all part of a continuous story for me.”
In the late 1960s, Rei...d attended Croydon School of Art, where he first met Malcolm McLaren. Drawn together by a shared interest in the Situationist International’s avant-garde coalition of artists, writers and revolutionary thinkers, Reid and McLaren organized student protests in London and traveled to Paris at the tail end of the Left Bank’s student uprisings.

In 1970, Reid co-founded Suburban Press, an agitprop magazine confronting corruption and corporate development in Croydon. Unable to afford typesetting tools, Reid repurposed materials from existing newspapers towards his own anarchist ends. Cutting, pasting and Xeroxing, he developed a DIY approach that would soon become his signature, when – while farming off the coast of Scotland – he received a telegram from McLaren about a band he was managing that brought Reid back to London in early 1976.
Reid created the album artwork for The Sex Pistols’ first four singles (“Anarchy in the U.K.,” “God Save The Queen,” “Pretty Vacant” and “Holidays in the Sun,”) as well as the group’s only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Reid’s iconoclastic décollage images – with ransom-note style lettering, vivid colors, historical and popular cultural references – are the defining visuals of the punk era. Reid is, “The person who really set typography alight in this country,” said British filmmaker, artist and gay rights activist Derek Jarman in 1992. “The way the typography is used, it’s aggressive and bright and absolutely of its time.”
In