Skateboarding: Urban Art & Culture Explored

Whoot, what happened here? Did I miss something? That was the first coming to my mind when I stumbled upon Kilian Martin’s weird, awesome skateboard tricks just now! Hailing from Spain, and known internationally as professional skateboarder creating an all new way to extend freestyle into the realm of street skating, Kilian Martin’s unique movements set him in a class of his own. Recently he spent some time in an abandoned water park together filmmaker Brett Novak to create his next video Kilian Martin: Altered Route… ...

That’s what I call a great skateboard event: In Vancouver, BC a few hundred people partied Halloween with an extraordinary skateboard fireworks jam in an abandoned skate-park tunnel! This event attracted that much attention throughout the entire galaxy that in addition to Harold Green, Vampires Dream, Banana, Lemmy, the She Wolfs, Manwolf, Ladyman, Scarecrow, Werewolf, Long Underwear Man, Clumsy Lumberjack and Dirty Hippy even Mr. Zaphod Beeblebrox himself came back to earth for a short skate-session! ...

Japanese skateboard sculptor Haroshi, who became infatuated with skateboarding in his early teens, creates impressive art by recycling old, broken skateboards and is still a passionate skater. I just stumbled upon some flicks from his latest exhibition in Los Angeles, which includes in addition to other skateboard sculptures, an amazing fuckfinger made of skateboards which is really killing it! Skateboard Sculpture Art In my eyes, being able to create those skateboard sculptures requires lots of technical skills as well as the right machines as it is mentioned on Haroshi’s website: ...

Because of my trip to this year’s IBUg urban art festival I wasn’t able to write about the latest street art and graffiti action, for what reason I’m going to give you a brief overview about what happened during the last days around the globe… The Photo is by Shok-1 by the way, who is a member of the Urban Artcore group on Flickr! Brad Downey and Akay visited the Italian Fame Festival and for example deleted some ugly cars in downtown Grottaglie… ...

It’s summer time and although we don’t have that much sun in Berlin right now, I beat about for some new sunglasses. What I found are those new Skateboard Shades by Eric Singer from Portland-based Shwood Eyewear… Crafted entirely in Shwood’s local woodshop, this one-of-a-kind pair of sunglasses was created out of curiosity, just to see what was possible. For his latest project, Eric met up with Keith Hufnagel and others to claim the streets of Los Angeles in pursuit of destroying some skateboard decks. The reason: He creates sunglasses made from broken skateboard decks! ...

After that nice Spray Paint Skateboard Interface by D*Face became popular (just check e.g. hypebeast, ukstreetart, urbanshit or welikethat) well-known, Berlin-based urban artist Dave the Chimp created his own DIY Skate & Paint Device and sent in that way some beef over to LA… You don’t need money, famous friends, and months of research and development to create something - you just need to think and to play. So switch off your computer, switch on your brain, and go create something fantastic yourself - you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve!!! (Dave the Chimp) ...

D*Face is skateboarding addicted - We knew that not just since he transformed the Ridiculous Pool into a skull-hell back in 2009! But know there’s no open question left… The famous urban artist recently went back to Peter King’s backyard in LA having a new invention, the so-called DFace Spray Paint Skateboard Interface*, in his bag, which allows skateboarders to add a spray-can to their deck. This can be easily triggered using a wireless clicker, what makes it possible to skate and paint the floor concurrent. ...

Customized Skateboards | Last weekend, the Berlin Art Projects Gallery opened its doors for the skateboard art show “The Helping Hounds Of Hell”, which presented a huge count of different skateboard decks, customized by about 40 artists from all over the globe! The Helping Hounds Of Hell is a charitable art project launched by the Berlin based design studio Groupe Dejour to benefit the Fair Play foundation. The hand painted, one of a kind boards will be sold at two exhibitions in Berlin and Hamburg. International artists, street artists and graphic designers will create unique boards for the show including Boris Hoppek, Jim Avignon, Jon Burgerman and Casey McKee. (houndsofhell.de) ...

Have you ever skateboarded an abandoned swimming pool? If not, your chance has come! It’s relative easy: All you have to do is to travel to one of these small villages in the United State like Fresno, find one of these empty houses with its big swimming pools, clean the pool and start to skateboard! And if you take some cans with you, you could paint the pool afterwards, like street artist D*Face did it some month ago… ...

I have some interesting news about the grandiose “Beautiful Losers” movie: The film, which had its global premier at SxSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas in March 2008, is available in its full length on Youtube since a few days ago… “Beautiful Losers” is a documentary film which gives some very special, entertaining and interesting insights into the live of some of the protagonists of the DIY (Do It Yourself) street art movement. It shows in an impressive way the creative life between skateboarding, punk, hip hop and graffiti. ...