Woah! I have been lagging on getting these photos up for a minute but here we are. A couple of months ago my buddy and professional artist friend Adam Mars invited me to an art show at Shepard Fairey's gallery in Echo Park called Subliminal Projects. The name and theme of the show was AGENTS PROVOCATEURS and it was such a blast from my 90's past. I loved the show and it was great to see a lot of the original decks that really transformed the skateboard graphic game.
All of a sudden, decks had become provocative manifestos. They talked about the violence of society, sex, politics, racism, drugs, religion, and international affairs. A new school of artists had taken over, and was deliberately willing to trigger something, anything, a reaction in the viewer. Skateboarding was a counter culture again. – Seb Carayol (Agents Provocateurs; Gingko Press, 2014)
Here is a bit from Shepard on the show:
Skateboarding and its culture changed my life. I grew up going to a conformist private prep school, and I had no therapeutic outlet to vent or focus my frustration until I discovered skateboarding. Skateboarding is creative and rebellious and it provided the most perfect balance of visceral and artistic rabble-rousing I could hope for. When I co-founded Subliminal in 1995 with my skateboard friends and fellow artists, Alfred Hawkins and Blaize Blouin, our goal was to put the spotlight on the artists doing the amazing skateboard graphics who had contributed significantly to the visual identity of the culture that shaped us profoundly. AGENTS PROVOCATEURS is the kind of exhibit that Subliminal Projects was founded to showcase! The vibrant, creative, fearless, culture of rebellion that is the distilled essence of skateboarding, and what drew me to it in the first place, is what AGENTS PROVOCATEURS is all about. There are a ton of killer deck graphics and fine art pieces by the same artists in the show. If you’ve ever ridden a plank with four wheels, listened to the Misfits and Public Enemy, but never to rent-a-cops, you need to be at this show! – Shepard Fairey, 2014