📷: (L) Slick Rick by Sophie Bramly (R) Slick Rick by Janette Beckman | Courtesy of TASCHEN Picture it: Detroit, the late 1980s. High school student Vikki Tobak awaited her turn to speak as the teacher asked the class: “What do you want to do when you grow up?” The teen, who first arrived in […]
Graffiti made its entrée into the art world in 1972, when the United Graffiti Artists held their first group show, “Floor To Ceiling,” at City College. A year later, UGA made more history, with the first ever exhibition of their work at an established art space—the Razor Gallery in Soho. For the next twenty years, […]
Alien Cake strain from Aurora Drift 📷: Craig Barker Cannabis Close-ups: a series celebrating the people doing some of the most important photojournalism there is… documenting cannabis. Craig Barker is a 34-year-old photographer from the UK who lives in Whistler, British Columbia and has a dream life: he’s making a career out of shooting eye-popping […]
📷: ART IS THE WORD by ALIVE 5 (1981) © Martha Cooper For some, the prestige of working at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History might be a lifelong goal, but Martha Cooper felt cooped up working behind a desk cataloging artifacts day in, day out. She yearned for freedom, action, and adventure — the […]
RIFF 170 expanding the boundaries of what piecing could be in 1973. 📷: Erik Calonius “Everything is connected to everything else. Urban clutter is connected to air pollution, to noise, to foul water. Agri-business is connected to the use of pesticides. Lifestyles are connected to solid wastes. And, so on.” Those were the guidelines the […]
Above: Tony Hawk’s first skateboard. (📷: National Museum of American History) In the newish Tony Hawk documentary, the often-spotted but identity-mistaken skater casually mentions how he donated his first skateboard to the Smithsonian. It was a “Bahne skateboard with red Stoker urethane wheels on metal trucks” according to its listing in the government’s colossal collection […]
📷: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Decades ago, when American kids started engaging in wildly interesting and fun new activities such as skateboarding, graffiti, rapping, breakdancing and gaming, the media struggled in its attempt to define these emerging subcultures. Many of the vintage articles on these subjects share some common threads: they’re typically condescending, alarmist, and […]
