Since you've got a major museum show coming up »43,000 Limbs - The Art and Life of Andy Howell« I thought we could start simply with this question: What's your favorite museum?

AH: I like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MOCA in LA, all the Paris Museums. I recently saw a Calder exhibit there I was really stoked on. I try and hit museums in all the cities that I go. What else is happening that's been good, I just went to a Seattle museum, just last month. Seattle Museum is split into I think two or three different parts and we went to, my wife is Chinese, so we went to the Chinese part of that museum. It was just amazing. I am really inspired by the line quality, and of course the traditional calligraphy, that's always something Chinese museums will show a lot of. They had a lot of the modern painters and contemporary artists, who are coming out now, and some who have been working in hiding for 20 to 30 years making incredible art, and it was really inspiring to see how people take that traditional education of calligraphy and turn it into a graphic line.

You seem to be influenced not just by fine arts, but by traditional crafts as well.

AH: I grew up in Virginia, and the area around where my family comes from had a number of different Chesapeake Bay Indian tribes and Native American tribes. I found arrowheads and stuff. I was also adopted, and my family had really light skin, I had really light skin, I always used to make believe I was from one of those native tribes in the area. That's kind of stuck with me, I was always very interested in anything that was a Native American craft, or when I've gone to other countries seeing the native art from there. I really like the Northwestern art, that is also like how folk art, American folk art, is the white Europeans coming to America's version of that native art. I actually love all the southern artists that were doing that kind of folk art. Howard Finster, we actually have one of his pieces at our house. I went to his place when I was living in Atlanta and saw the garden and everything he made, so I've been really turned on by artists that are using feeling, the materials their finding and create their own graphic imagery. The line quality that comes from the Native Americans of the Northwest part of the US, especially Oregon and Washington, have just got amazing qualities.

Some of the recent stuff I've been doing, integrating a childhood of cartoons and graphics and animation and everything I grew up with being plopped in front of the TV as a kid and watching the movement of all the famous characters, I grew up on that. Then when I got into the graffiti aesthetic, and also the twisting of comic book art for graphic novels and adult comics, that really put a little fire into my ass and I took that inspiration, along with traditional art education from the art institute down there, and came up with what I think is the genesis of a lot of the comic inspired and graffiti inspired skate graphics that came in the early 90s. I may have been one of the first people to do that. So that graphic style became a icon for a lot of people who were creative and also into activities like skateboarding and snowboarding, and that sparked a whole bunch of artists and a generation was brought up on that kind of graphic line aesthetic.

Do you think growing up near DC gave you a lot of balance, in terms of searching for the Native American roots on one hand, and on the other the hardcore scene and other urban arts? Balance between the new urban and a more historically minded childhood.

AH: Did you say suburban minded?

No, I said historically minded.

AH: I mean, I wouldn’t say I was really historically minded. I just loved the idea of the way Native Americans lived and the free environment, and it was all around me as a kid. I was living in a fantasy land, incorporating that into my imagination. When I got to be about 13 or 14, I found skateboarding. Along with that came Thrasher Magazine, the elements of Thrasher were really punk charged at that time. I was actually in Virginia Beach, so I was really close to DC and the punk scene that came out of DC, also Richmond and North Carolina; from Bad Brains to Corrosion of Conformity. The influence I got from that was, and during that same time that I found skating I was pushing into this dark world a little bit, so I had the outcast artist plus the completely outcast skater, which at that time was not even understood. People would literally jump out the way if you came gliding down the sidewalk on a skateboard. But, I combined that together with punk music, at least in the beginning before hip-hop music came in punk music was the theme song of the beginnings of a skateboarders life. “Fuck the system,� etc., was pretty much if we could have had tattoos at 13 years old, that’s what we would have had tattooed on our arms.

Are you influenced by tattoo art?

AH: I am not heavily influenced by it. I love the graphic line of people like Mike Giant, who’s a little bit influenced by graffiti at the same time. I don’t follow tattoo art, per say, but sometimes my art has been used for tattoos, so there has got to be some kind of connection.

I want to talk a little about the coming up with an outsider perspective towards and then progressing to doing graphic design and art direction for some pretty mainstream entities.

AH: Yeah, that’s a big question actually. The shortest, and most direct, answer is as a kid I was an artist making Xerox posters for all my buddies that had punk bands and drawing their album covers and making them on a friends parents Xerox machine at their office, pre-kinkos, I was also trying to get up in some way. Making my own skate ‘zines taught me that I could do, in this DIY culture that was being formed at the time, that I could do anything that I wanted to do. I could do a magazine, my own screen printing. My mom got me a screen print kit, and I could make tee shirts at 14 years old. Pretty early on, I had the feeling that I could do anything. Later, I went to art school in Atlanta, where I found hip-hop music and graffiti, and really became interested in the idea of getting up and getting over, putting tags everywhere. When I turned pro and started New Deal, and later Element, the graphics and stuff that I did a lot of times I would paint on walls before hand, really big. Going out at night and bombing. One of the places… the idea was just getting up. When I started the skate company, suddenly I was getting up to thousands of kids with whatever sticker I wanted to make, with whatever t-shirt, catalog, skate graphic. Oh, I think will make jeans, I made the first baggy jeans for skate kids. I kind of got this empowered feeling that anything at all was possible as long as I followed what my inspiration was. Later, that opened up when I created an agency that was based around the youth culture of action sports and music, and that lifestyle called Image Works, which I stared with my partner Greg Deleao, the founder of Forum Snowboards and Division 23. We got together and decided, with the onset of the X-Games, everyone’s going to do what they always did, big companies are going to try and come in and sprinkle some money in and if its done in a bad way its going to make action sports and the lifestyle look stupid. It’s going to become lame again like it did in the late ‘70s and parts of the early ‘80s. So, that kind of opened up the doors for me to do all sorts of different projects.

One of the ones that stands out the most was a Happy Meal I did from McDonald's. I was actually approached to take the idea of the finger skateboard and create a world around it. I created this group of non-descript characters, that were in my little world, and they each had on signature model and also build a skate park that snapped together. It was pretty interesting, because at first there was that idea of grappling with idea of the sell out factor, working with somebody like McDonald's, but as a traditionally educated fine artist and visual communicator it was a great opportunity to get up to a ton of kids in a different age group than I had ever been involved with before. I think the target age was 3-8. So, I developed the concept and everything and when they and also, one of the key things is, I had to have some sort of subversive element in there. I kept, I made these little stickers that came with the packaging, and you could put them on the little skateboards or ramps, the stickers were all the same tags and graffiti line I used to do in the bathrooms of McDonalds when I lived in Atlanta. That Happy Meal was for all of North America and I think it beat out some of the major movies that came out. It was amazing, as an artist, to be able to reach kids that had not yet been touched by skateboard art and the peer pressure or images that came to them as teenagers. What happened was, the promotion ended up attracting people up to 14 and 15 years old. It was kind of a trip, because teenage kids were going to buy Happy Meals so they could get the entire skate park, which was pretty funny. That ended up being a top 10 sale for all of North America, and it was number 1 for Australia and New Zealand. It ended up selling something like 73 million units in 5 weeks. So, as an artist it was really incredible to see that same feeling I had in creating skate stickers, back in the day, going out to thousands of people to suddenly going out in a 5 week period and touching more people than I ever had in my life in art all combined. That was pretty interesting and early on I decided, and I might have been one of the earliest, that the idea of selling out wasn't actually selling out. I partially had that because a lot of my friends were involved in music, a lot of the big producers and even some of the big rap acts in Atlanta, I was looking at the size of the industry that skateboarding was, and then looking at what they were doing. There was just a huge difference in the level of distribution and connectivity to some end source or use. With me it was skate kids, a finite group, with these guys it was anybody that listened to the radio. I was always inspired to do more and go bigger every time.

Validation of folk and outsider arts has a long and somewhat tumultuous history (we can think about a range of arts here... dance, jazz, dj'ing, graphic). I think the streetwear world, at least in the form presented in many of the blogs, is just realizing this. What do you view as important stepping stones in this quest?

AH: Well, as powerful as it can be for an illustrator or designer to commodify art in the popular culture sense, equally as powerful is the need for folk artists to continue to push on in the direction they move away from (or at least on the fringe of) the mainstream focus. As artists like Howard Finster created a very fringe commentary of common life decades ago, so Mark Gonzales, Jim Hauser, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, and Barry McGee have in this generation (among many others). Only they are making commentary on life as artists, graffiti writers, skateboarders, musicians. This seems a far cry from the country life Finster commented on years ago. But I pose the argument that these are the folk artists of my culture. And in that way there is a sacred nature to their work to be passed on as history. As for the tumultuous history for this generation? That part is over, since the subculture is now a revered mainstream culture. Of course you have to look between the lines to see the next surge in the underground, which inevitably, is coming.

How do you handle the issue of authenticity in addressing some of the challenges of expressing exactly what you want when you undertake a major corporate project?

AH: It depends on the client really. I'm not currently doing a lot of major corporate stuff, but the experiences I've had in the past it depended. I did stuff with Coca-Cola. I'd walk into the boardroom with all these, what I considered, really cool and awesome and authentic ideas. Then, I think at one time I was in a boardroom with like 30 executives at Coke to tell them what they should do with a new energy drink they had coming out. The amount of bureaucracy in some of these companies is pretty incredible. There are brand managers and assistants to the brand managers, and someone who oversees the brand, and kind of manages the brand manager. It's such a dog eat dog in world within the corporations, that with everyone needing to and trying to get their view in, it ends up watering down really the creative element. But, that's always going to happen, because in the end the creative element is just a service to the brand. The people in the brand make the final decision.

How vital are corporate commissions to the success and growth of a career in the (contemporary) arts?

AH That really depends on the goals of the individual artist. My understanding of corporate commission clients is that the figurative work is less exciting to them than more abstract work. That being said, grouped corporate commissions can quickly enable artists to produce larger works utilizing far more expansive spaces that those of private collectors. As for commercial projects, that is also dictated by the choice or career path of the individual artist. This type of work can provide mass exposure as well as, in the case of more illustrative artists, can provide a steady income and even special licensed or collaborative products. This is very popular in the action sports world, as well as other industries including vinyl figures and shoes.

How does your company, Artsprojek, work to navigate the tensions and troubles associated with these commissions?

AH: It is a strictly individual approach that ARTSPROJEKT takes; first working with the individual to help create guidelines for this type of work that will most benefit the artist in reaching his or her goals. Once the guideline have been set, a process of placing the artists with collectors, galleries, traveling exhibitions, corporate collaborations, creating limited multiples (editions) of chosen work to marketed and sold, or any number of other directions the artist chooses

We talked about working through bureaucracy and a range of desires. What are some important rules and or keys in building strong relationships through corporate projects?

AH: Always maintaining integrity as it pertains to the artist's long-term goals. Career artists, the ones who cannot live without making art, must also protect the name, image, and notoriety they may be working so hard to create. This means entering into working relationships with corporations as an artist, looking for those entities to license the work for a specified time, charging separately for the ownership of the image or extended usage rights, and always negotiating the terms of engagement to include marketing and promotion of the artist, including websites and logos or recognizable signatures. Negotiating bonuses or royalties where appropriate. The corporations want to align with the artist, usually for the respect or image association that artist can bring within a certain group of people. People that the corporations want to have as customers ultimately. I think early on many of the corporations bought art at severely discounted prices from artists who were just happy to be out there. There will always be that entry level designer or illustrator who wants to get out there who will work for really cheap. The points I was making above pertain mostly to emerging and established contemporary artists. And sometimes the corporate route doesn't fit at all with artists goals, and there are many other options.

Can you describe a moment that really pushed you to understanding the need for the mentoring services you now offer?

AH: Through my career as a professional artist (and earlier career as a professional skateboarder and company founder), I have always found the need to share my vision or understanding of certain aspects of art and the business of art. Since I was involved in the creation of at least the current iteration of the skateboard world (starting in 1989) and a resulting art movement, there has always been the need to proliferate and inspire in all forms. To add to the circle of inspiration that drives us to be artists in any form. That inspiration has cycled around a number of times in my career, and many of the artists or creative people that I help inspire through my work have come back around to inspire me in turn. That is really what drives the need to mentor; it's as much a responsibility as it is an honor.

I want to shift focus ever so slightly from corporate commissions to corporate sponsorship of the arts, and your thoughts on that. Specifically, both Target and Bank of America allow a great number of people to visit museums free of charge (like MOMA's free night and many of the other contemporary art museums). Do you think this is positive, or potentially limiting as to what people will see in the future?

AH: I don't know if I understand or agree that it could be limiting as to what people could see in the future. I think one of the key elements is going back to the education of people and, you know, people coming from high school and having absolutely no creative background in the arts or music. Then going into the world and getting into the rat race never seeing art in there life, that's what's happening to kids, at least in America, right now. I think that if corporate sponsors being behind, they are the only ones that can fund really large amounts of money. I know that a lot of private philanthropists putting energy and money behind the museums, but then there are only a few individuals that can do that on any kind of level that can be close to what corporate investment can do. I think that, the same way I believe about making art for different people and spreading it out to the masses, its really important that America has a way to embrace and love art, so that creative people still have the impulse to make art. Perhaps if corporate sponsors can put money into museums, and they are not just paying the entry fees, but also put money into the institutions, and that is valuable.

I want to talk briefly about influences. I thought I could mention a name of an artist and see where it goes.

AH: OK.

Andy Warhol.

AH: I'm influenced by Warhol's vision of the factory. I never was really into his artwork, and when I was a teenager (10, 11, 12 years old) I would see Warhol's art. I didn't really like it when I was younger, though now I can appreciate it a little more; I'm turning 40 this year. At the time I wasn't really into it. Later, when I went art school and then started the company, I was again inspired by the idea of the factory. We created a warehouse/factory where a lot of people came together to create art. Jose Gomez was a resident there, Shepherd Fairy. We had a music production studio, and what I believe was one of the first computer labs in an art studio. We also had a warehouse where we were creating t-shirts and clothes. So that was what was influential, not so much the art.

I was wondering if you were influenced by Romare Bearden at all.

AH: No, I don't know who that is.

He is an artist that was heavily influenced by jazz and the surrounding culture. I see some really subtle similarities in that you both respond to the specifics of a generational culture.

AH That's interesting. I'd love to see some of his work, because I have never heard of him. The circle of inspiration that keeps going round and round across generations, the creative person taping into the universal mind of consciousness and creativity, its interesting to go back period by period and see the people who were considered almost like street artists or creating the graphic line. Somebody was recently writing a thesis for one of the art schools, in London I think, and they had a comparison between me and Henry Toulouse-Lautrec, which is interesting because what everyone knows him for is not something that would necessarily look like my art. He went back into the sketches and art that was done on the street, the really loose almost gesture type art, and it was cool to see the connections graphic wise.

Are you influenced by any architects?

AH: Not particularly, no. I like architecture, modern especially. It's actually the opposite of what my art work looks like.

I was thinking more in terms of how the line and shape of architecture can fall in line with some of the influences you mentioned earlier. Certainly, Wright was influenced by a Japanese line aesthetic.

AH: I like Frank Lloyd Wright. When I was in Atlanta one of my friends had a Frank Lloyd Wright house and I liked it. I couldn't see any direct inspiration that could come from it.

I guess we should talk about fashion. I wanted to get an idea of some of the brands that might have influenced you when you made the decision to start making clothing specifically for skateboarding, where the aesthetic or cut was coming from perhaps.

AH: Well, this is a period piece. You have to go back to the late 80s, early 90s, when I really started to get into fashion, which happened because I got a huge budget for making clothing. I started making a lot of money from being a pro skater; I would buy all kinds of high end brands, from Armani to Gucci. I loved the detail that was put into pieces like that. At the same time, at the opposite side of the fence, was all the music culture that I was into. Like hip-hop was kind of what went hand in hand with skateboarding for me, on a street level. I spent a lot of time in New York, and in Atlanta, and I was influenced by the kind of clothing the hip-hop kids were wearing. It was extremely hot in Atlanta in the summer time, unbearably hot. You couldn't really wear shorts when you were skating, as you were constantly having shins and knees gauged onto benches and everything. Everyone wore jeans, but it was so hot and sweaty that our jeans were sticking to our legs. I looked across the way, and saw hip-hop kids, and thought maybe if we did the jeans a little baggier, people had really really tight jeans at that time, and see if it worked. So me and my friends went out and bought some big jeans and cut the bottoms off, and it made this really ragged fringe, and then it became my concept for Big Deals, which were the first baggy jeans for skate culture. In a way, that kind of inspired, it branched off into different subculture groups.

The cut of that came from different silhouettes. I put two different silhouettes together and had the vision of having the body of like a 34 and the waist of a 24/28. That became a really baggy pant. The yoke at the back, the whole shape had to be changed to fit around somebody's waist. It was functionality in the beginning, as well as the budget to buy clothes. I thought, well I also have a factory for skateboards, why can't we have or work with a factory that makes clothing. We had this huge audience from the skateboard company, we should make the clothing for skating too. What came out of that with New Deal was really cool, because there wasn't really skate clothing at that time. So, we got to really mess around with a lot of different stuff. My partners in the company weren't really interested in making clothes outside of skate. But I was. So I started a company called Zero Sophisto. Basically, this name was an alter-ego of mine. His first name was Zero, last name Sophisto, and it came out of being called a Zero as a skateboarder, and the book Clock Work Orange, they were talking about the Sophistos. They were the upper class, and we were the opposite, but had our own sophistication at the same time. Our own language. I started designing with that idea, and creating a lot of politically charged tee-shirt graphics. Pretty shortly after that it became a total line, almost 40 or 45 pieces. All times of button-up shirts, pants, jeans, shorts and jackets. We even did snowboarding gear.

Did you have any fashion or textile training in art school?

AH: None at all. I think at one point there was a quarter that had some sort of fashion element, but it was more of a life drawing element with people wearing clothes or doing fashion poses. It just came from a necessity to have something designed for skating.

It seems like it came pretty naturally

AH: Yeah, I mean, being a creative person I don't limit myself to any one medium. As long as I don't have any rules in my own head, about what can and can't be done, then I can easily flow between different mediums. Fashion for me was one medium. Right now I am not so interested in fashion, I'm not following it per say. My wife is an amazing couture fashion and jewelry designer, and I'm kind of the opposite. I walk around in my jeans and my house shoes, with a Mohawk. And she's got all this really high fashion gear.

So, at this point, let's move full circle and discuss how you feel about moving your art work into museums.

AH: Yeah, it's an honor for me. There are different levels of my experience with it so far. The first is, wow. How cool, such an honor to be included in a museum and to be given 6,000 sq. feet to do whatever I want pretty much. So, that in itself is kind of cool, just to have that pat on the back to say, you have been part of a revolution pretty much in youth culture. Then I went back and thought about it. Is it going to be about my paintings, or sculptures, or fashion stuff or video work? That's when the concept of the exhibition really started coming together. I went back to what was one of the most important things to me in art, which is collaboration. I think that the culture that we are involved in right now is highly collaborative. That crosses all the boundaries we talked about at the beginning of the interview. I've done a lot of that work with different companies, so some of that stuff is going to be featured in the exhibit. There is also a lot of traditional two and three dimensional work that I've been doing, mural work. I'm also going to be brining in a number of different artists that are my peers and friends and people I have collaborated with. I've done so many collaborations with different artists; I'm going to use some of that from the past so there's a little bit of history in it. And also collaborate with some of the newer people that are coming up. Going back to some of the people that influenced me, and working with some of the new people, and seeing how that circle of inspiration continues to go around. I mentioned Toulouse-Lautrect, obviously I didn't know that person, he's way before me, but how that circle of inspiration keeps turning over and over again. That's a topic I wanted to address. I am doing pieces related to music and fashion. We are doing an element where we take pieces of fashion from action sports and create a couture line out of it. Taking a men's sports line, some of my friends are big designers in that world, and doing, my wife's involved in this one, she's going to be creating couture lines out of them for women. This dichotomy you see between those two is going to be pretty interesting. From a music level, I'm going to be taking the idea of lyrics and spoken word, because lyrics have been such a huge inspiration for me, I'm one of those people that can remember every word to every song I've ever heard. Rap music was really powerful for me in that, what I considered the punk music of the urban world. I'm going combine some of that, and I've been talking to some of my friends and people that I know, like Lil' Jon and Krs-One. Just different people I know about being involved in that, feeding some kind of an art piece outside of what they might have done before

Is there a medium you don't like?

AH: Oils.

Why is that?

AH: I can't wait for them. My attention span, especially when I'm making art is so short that I can't wait for oils. Oils are, maybe at some point when the speed of my life slows down then I'll experiment with that, but my wife has used oils for a long time and it just takes too long. Maybe, in some way, that contributes to making me a pop artist because I like the speed of an idea coming and being manifested into reality.

You get a huge charge out of giving someone a piece of your art to take with them and keep, from the McDonalds Happy Meal, to skateboards, to t-shirts. In doing the exhibit do you plan anything, as a sold item or take away?

AH: There is certainly going to be some sold items. Limited edition items with the people I'm working with. We are talking to some toy companies about creating pieces just for the life of the exhibition. So, yeah, there's that sold item piece, where you can take away a piece of art that is endemic to the show itself. Also, we've been throwing around the idea of producing something just like the old skate zines we used to make, but including art and writing from the people involved in the show.

The exhibition has also been designed to travel. The intention is not for it to be a one time deal, but for it to have a life of five years or so traveling around the world. What's important in this is at least one person who was influential, his experience in it, and his connections and collaborations from that. Also, a statement about the nature of the Renaissance man, I guess, and all the people I've been around who have done a lot of different things. That's something that I think is interesting and will resonate with people around the world who are either influenced by us or have had similar experiences

www.andyhowell.com