Naming Wrongs was a line of T-shirts meant to protest the selling of stadium and arena names to corporate advertisers. Over the course of about 15 years, we produced hundreds of designs honoring either previous non-corporate names of existing facilities, or previous non-corporate-named facilities that had been replaced by corporate-named facilities.
This project was born in 2009, when he country was emerging from the 2008 financial crisis. Citibank was one of the banks that had to be bailed out by the federal government, so when the New York Mets announced that they’d sold their new stadium’s naming rights to Citi, lots of people were saying things like, “They should call it Taxpayer Park!” or “They should call it Debits Field!” and lots of other sarcastic names. The Rev. Vince Anderson — a New York musician — basically said, “Fuck it — I’m calling it Shea.” It made sense, since the new stadium was built in Shea’s parking lot. Same site, same name. That’s how the first shirt in this series, “I’m Calling It Shea,” came about. It was a big hit, and the rest of the project developed from there — first as a collaboration between Uni Watch, Anderson, and the Brooklyn apparel company No Mas, and later as a full-on Uni Watch project (with Anderson’s and No Mas’s blessing).
Here’s a small sampling of some of the other designs (you can click on the thumbnails to see larger versions):
The project was abandoned in the early 2020s and the designs are no longer in production.