Still from Ryan Harrington’s most recent Instagram post at @astrayart.

Is skateboarding an entry drug? To art?

In our article last week on Alma Allen—the Utah-born sculptor now working out of Mexico who will represent the United States at the Venice Biennale—we sketched out his teenage years, which began with skateboarding (and hardcore music) and led, eventually, to art.

This would have been the mid-’80s, that hinge era between the surf culture of the ’70s and the street scene of the ’90s. In those years he might well have crossed paths with Peter Everett, a Provo native, if his family hadn’t moved. Everett—now a respected professor of art at Brigham Young University—also grew up skating, absorbing the visual language of early skate graphics before he ever set foot in an art school.

They are by no means alone.

In the next generation there’s Trent Call, one of Salt Lake City’s more prolific muralists, who has often said he grew up obsessed with Thrasher-style graphics, underground comics, and skateboard decks—early influences that still shape the angular, kinetic linework of his illustrations and paintings.

A deck of decks in Chuck Landvatter’s Salt Lake City home, October 2023. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

When Chuck Landvatter wanted to discuss street vs. sanctioned mural work in our 15 Bytes profile of him in 2023, he reached for a boarding metaphor, comparing it to the different vibes between longboarding and skateboarding. And when we visited his home we saw that his interior design was as influenced as much by skate world as by the art world.

Mike Murdock—the artist whose paint work on the 9th and 9th whale is about to be painted over—also skates. Murdock even runs a tongue-in-cheek “pretend” skateboard company called The Wigglestick, through which he produces absurdist, sculptural boards made from scavenged materials. The project is half performance, half object, and entirely rooted in skate culture’s irreverence.

Photographer Daniel George ties his artistic beginnings directly to skateboarding. His series Create and Destroy reflects on teenage years spent roaming neighborhoods with a board and a camera, documenting skate culture and the built environments that shape it.

Range a bit on social media and you’ll start seeing the skateboarding-art connection. Visit Art Morrill’s Instagram page and wedged between posts about his paintings you’ll find the unmistakeable signs of a skate parent: “Proud dad moment. He landed his first drop-in on a quarter in the first four tries.”

Head over to Ryan Harrington’s account (@astryart) and all you’ll find are skate clips—street lines, bowls, wipeouts, triumphs. Harrington recently organized Common Shred, a group exhibition at Harrington Art Studio that invited Utah artists with skate backgrounds to paint and print on blank decks, removing the art from the gallery wall and returning it to the object that shaped them. The show’s roster was a roll call of local skaters-turned-artists (and yeah, we probably should have written this article then).

And the list keeps going: Eric Fairclough, Kellie Bornhoft, James Talbot, Eric Edvalson—all either active skaters or raised in skate culture, spanning sculpture, photography, installation and public art.

Maybe it’s just coincidence: maybe we could find an equally long list of former football players who make art. We have our doubts.

Jared Steffensen argues that skateboarding and art are driven by some of the same impulses.

“Skateboarders are usually outsiders; so are artists,” he says. “Skateboarding is a community of individuals. So is art.”

Steffensen has long thought about this overlap. As curator at UMOCA, he has—both knowingly and unknowingly—folded skate artists and skate aesthetics into his programming. The roster is impressive: Max Palmer, Clark Derbes, Thomas Campbell, Aaron Hegert, Martin Nunez, Andrew Dadson, Ed Templeton, Nathaniel Russell. “Skateboarders see places and object differently than most people,” he says. “They are inherently creative when it comes to how they interact with them. They are constantly coming up with new ideas on how things can be used, at the same time they are using the same tool to do it, their skateboard.”

Jared Steffensen’s “Left Over 37” will be at ONE Modern Art in Salt Lake City.

It has shaped his own work even more directly. His 2023 exhibition Nosey Taily and the Leftover transformed broken skateboard decks into sculptural assemblages—colorful, layered “leftovers” that foreground the physical traces of riding. The exhibition treated ruined decks not as trash but as artifacts of risk, repetition and invention.

And he’s continuing that line of inquiry: this weekend, his newest work will be part of a four-artists exhibit at ONE Modern Art in Salt Lake City. In these works the strips and arcs of old boards twist into airy, almost botanical forms—petal-like, rib-like, spine-like. In some, the original graphics peek through like embedded geological strata; in others, color blocks or grip-tape scars appear as punctuation within otherwise rhythmic, bent-wood structures. The works feel both engineered and improvised, as if Steffensen were asking what motion looks like when frozen mid-curve.

That balance between intention and uncertainty is central to how he thinks about the practice itself. “Skateboarding is about learning from failure. So is art,” Steffensen says. And continues: “Skateboarding isn’t about ‘winning,’ and I don’t think art is either.”

We shouldn’t blow things out of proportion: not all skateboarders will become art addicts. But it’s a possibility. It might be that both tap into the same nervous system: repetition without reward, obsession without guarantees, a willingness to fall and get back up, over and over, until something clicks.

Young artists looking to get into the local scene, you could attend openings, visit studios, talk to gallerists, support fundraisers— all good ideas. You also might want to spend some time at the local skate park.

Jared Steffensen’s work will be at Experiments in Dimensional Drift (also featuring the work of Nolan Flynn, John Bell and Janell James) at One Modern Art, Saturday, Dec. 6, 5-9 pm and at Material’s 1st Annual Holiday Small Works Show, Dec. 5-21.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.