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Where does the list start? Zero Sophisto, Ma$$ prophets, New Deal, underworld Element, Artsprojekts, pro skater, hip-hop musician, curator, and of course, fine artist, Andy Howell’s an original. To foresee—nearly two decades ago—the power and relevance of

fusing hip-hop, skateboarding, and fine art has made Andy Howell one of the pioneers of current popular culture. His creative and business sense has indeed set him (alongside a select other few in the industry) ahead of the times.

The origins of Andy’s story involve other innovative artists that helped lay the foundation for contemporary hip-hop and art. On a February afternoon in Los Angeles, California, Andy met up with old friends Shepard Fairey and hip-hop artist and producer Lil Jon to discuss how each one’s past has contributed to the future and the way artists relate to today’s mainstream mass. Juxtapoz sat down with Andy afterward to inquire more about his past, present, and future of the enterprise that is Andy Howell. What’s biggest on the horizon? A museum exhibition under his and Artsprojekts’ direction that will serve as a “passionate commentary on the creative cycle of inspiration and innovation incorporating a cross section of artists, musicians,

directors, animators, and trendsetting designers of couture, action sports, and street fashions.” In short, an exhibition that is every bit Andy Howell. As Lil Jon tendered to Andy, “You were always in control of your own destiny.” The mission isn’t even close to being finished. —Evan Pricco

Andy Howell: The story of Lil Jon and I goes way back, and Shep and I go back even further. Probably met Jon in 1991 or ’92. At that time I was a pro skater putting graffiti that I was doing on graphics, had just finished art school, and was about to start Underworld Element, (today known as just Element). Dude, Jon, how the hell did we really meet?

Lil Jon: Atlanta had two main

skateshops. Stratosphere was the shop that introduced contests to Atlanta. Nobody was doing that before them. I worked at Skate Escape, which was a spot in Piedmont Park where you could rent skates and bikes, and if you wanted to take your girl out and rollerskate you would come here. But they also had a skateshop inside with all the hottest decks and rollerblades.

Andy: I remember at the time we were going to Piedmont Park on Sundays to cool out and skate, with beers and girls in tow. And like 50 dreads in a drum circle would be on the hill passing around the beat, and that was our soundtrack. Before I met Jon at Skate Escape, I’d bought an analog eight-track recorder and a keyboard with

a 30-second sampler, which at that time was insanely tech. I met Gangstarr on a skate tour and got some phone coaching from Premier on how to sample beats and make drum sets. But I was fusing Sesame Street beats with GI Joe music, and adding punk beats and making this weird hybrid that ended up sounding like carnival hip-hop with ADD. I was listening to all the experimental stuff like KMD, Native Tongues, Del and Hieroglyphics, and the first PE record. Somehow I heard that you were making music.

Lil Jon: Y’all didn’t have a DJ so I became your DJ. I remember sitting in one of your rooms for hours just looking for samples. You were never in there because you always had too much shit to do. You were designing t-shirts, skating—you

ANDY HOWELL

King and Queen of Goodness

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Walking Amonf the Normal

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were running three companies.

Andy: I always dug your energy back then; that’s why I went looking for you at Skate Escape that first day. I remember picking you up at your mom’s house, down in the basement bedroom with your turntables. You were like “Check this shit out,” and put on Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man.” The crossover interests of different kinds of music were influencing you as well.

Lil Jon: Did you know we had a record deal? Some overseas label. I was like, “We had a fucking record deal?”

Andy: Mo’ Wax, dude, before it was Mo’ Wax. I spoke to James Lavelle; he was the roommate of my

distributor for Zero Sophisto in the UK, and the deal he offered was we had to record everything ourselves, give them the finished product, and they would put it out on their label, which I think would have ended up being the first Mo’ Wax EP ever made. Pretty stupid in retrospect, but coming from skateboarding and art, complete DIY-type shit, I didn’t really understand the music industry at that time. With skating or graff or a t-shirt company, all we had to do was make a screenprint on a tee in my room and we had a brand that would develop virally. We were able to cross promote skateboarding and art and graffiti, and even the music through my distribution company, but the industry really wasn’t sophisticated enough to think outside of decks back then.

Shepard Fairey: Andy was the first person I ever met who needed a personal assistant. You would have one computer doing one thing, another one doing another, delivery guy banging on your door, and I remember thinking, “Man, that guy’s life is chaotic. He’s doing so much shit.” This was the summer of 1992. You were one of the first people I knew who was using the computer as a design tool, doing both hand-illustrated work mixed with typography that you created digitally. Definitely ahead of the curve on that.

Lil Jon: When I was around in the early ’90s, New Deal was popping. Then Underground Element was starting toward the end of us hanging out a lot. I remember Andy had a t-shirt press in the living

room, and we would make Ma$$ Prophets t-shirts and wear them straight off the press when they were still warm. It would be like, Yeah, motherfucker.” We were just having a good time and making music.

Andy: “Kids sneakin’, cans leakin’, all the girls freakin’.…” We were talking about things that related to the skateboard and graffiti culture in the lyrics, and of course about girls. At that time, except for maybe the Beastie Boys, there wasn’t much out there like it.

Lil Jon: It would be compared to some backpack hip-hop now. I listen to our stuff, and if it came out today it would still be relevant in that world. The beats and samples we used were like rock breakbeats.

It sounded like music and beats that kids could be making today. It wasn’t bad at all, which fucked me up listening back to it. It sounded really good for 1991.

Shepard: I remember seeing Andy for the first time in a Thrasher spread in 1987. Then at the Savannah Slamma II contest my friends and I saw Andy skating on the street; he was the first guy I’d ever seen in person do a no comply off a parking block. We thought, “Oh my god, this guy’s so ill.” So I was a fan of Andy through skateboarding. Then he turned pro through Schmitt Stix and did a sick board graphic for them that I thought was fresh. I’d heard through a few interviews that you were starting Sophisto, which started a year later in 1991.

It was the Pro Spotlight in Transworld where you mentioned that you wanted to do a book of skateboarder’s art. You put your address at the end of the interview to accept submissions. I sent a package out to Andy, and he called me back at my parent’s house and said he was into my work and he was going to fax me some questions. I kept thinking, “Oh shit, this guy’s so tech—he’s going to fax me questions.” We’ve been friends ever since.

What I liked was that Andy was taking control of his own destiny and not letting a company dictate what he was going to do. Also, having Sophisto, which was about conscious politics, was something I really admired.

Andy: Zero Sophisto started as a reflection of Atlanta and us all skating the city with everyone in our crew. Skateboarding was universal. All sorts of different races and cultures together, and in the middle of Atlanta? That was an anomaly. Seeing how “normal” people in ATL acted toward each other really provoked me to call bullshit on the establishment. I started drawing graphics with crayons for clothes to make it appear as if all these political statements were coming from a kid writing them on the street in the middle of the city. I wanted to show that this new language, which I called Zero Sophisto, was being created by kids with skateboards and paint cans. It pushed me. I felt lucky I could speak out to so many people like that through the company.

The New Deal logo and graphics at first reflected that thinking, but had to be watered down for Middle America at the time.

I remember bringing Lil Jon to the launch of Underworld Element at ASR in 1992 and he DJ’ed in my booth. Sen and Jaz had painted this huge piece as a backdrop of the booth. I shot a promo video with all the art and skating and hip-hop mixed together, and even the team making explosives from the book Poor Man’s James Bond. There were a lot of guys who came to the show looking to take orders for their shops from this new brand, and were blown away by Lil Jon mixing records. At that time hip-hop had nothing to do with skating. People at ASR were baffled, absolutely no clue. The

:fOR ME EvERYTHINg cuLTuRALLY, ARTISTIcALLY, AND EvEN TEcHNOLOgIcALLY HAS MERgED.”

ANDY HOWELL

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Europeans and Japanese caught on to it immediately, and the bigger United States cities. It narrowed our audience a bit from New Deal, but I kept thinking, “This is next!”

Shepard: You were the first guy creating the aesthetic of this hip-hop/skate fusion. You were doing graffiti/hip-hop graphics on decks, really on the front end of that curve.

Andy: New York influenced me a lot. I used to spend summers in the Lower East Side at Jeremy Henderson’s between ’89 and ’92. He had original Keith Haring and Basquiat drawings, was connected with all the graff artists, and was pro for SHUT. The hip-hop kids in NY were really looking across the club at that point and kind of nodding to the skate kids. There

was no crossover, just a mutual respect creatively. It was an infant scene at the time of hip-hop kids, skaters, and street artists. It was even smaller in Atlanta at the time, but there were a group of us making beats and skating and writing graffiti. Of course my graffiti became skateboard graphics, and then started getting into some of the original art shows at Alleged Gallery on Stanton and Ludlow. A lot of my early graphics for New Deal and Underworld Element were inspired by NY graffiti.

Goodie Mob, Dallas Austin, Lil Jon, and a few others were responsible for creating a music scene in Atlanta like NY was able to do. But it was even more underground, and just dirty and raw like the South was at that time. Jon actually

branded the ATL sound in a way with Crunk.

It’s crazy to think how far all of this has come. Now it’s Shepard Fairey of Obey, Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz, me and my whole Artsprojekt trip, Johnny Schillereff now runs Element, all born out of, in some way, a life of art and skateboarding. And all of it’s part of a circle of inspiration that a handful of us were responsible for and now just keeps turning and being renewed a thousand fold every time.

Shepard: Seeing the connection between music, skateboarding, and art, and seeing how you took creative control of the cultures you were participating in was always something that was huge for me. Especially how you were one of

the first people to really embrace graphic design intertwined with illustration. You seized the coming of digital media and art really seamlessly.

Andy: All three of us individually, when it’s all said and done, played major roles in first innovating and inspiring new movements, and later the sophistication and commercialization of hip-hop music, skateboarding, and certain kinds of art. Back in the day that would have sounded taboo, but now it’s the driving force of this art genre and pop culture. Jon, you never thought you were going to create a new genre of music when you were listening to punk and skating; Shepard never expected to inspire a wheatpaste and stencil movement when you first put up

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those stickers in Providence; and I never thought I’d help influence the fusion of art, skateboarding, and hip-hop culture when I was rapping in my high school art class. We all ping-ponged ideas off each other over and over again, indirectly at times, which is really how popular culture evolves.

Lil Jon: Skateboarding gave me diversity in music. I wouldn’t know Bad Brains, Steel Pulse, the Moles, and there would be a huge void in my music. That sort of creativity and culture born from skateboarding allows me to be dropped in any scenario and hang out with anyone and not feel out of place. Skating gave me that. I always admired Andy for taking me out of Atlanta and showing me a whole other thing by letting

me DJ. How you controlled your own destiny was huge for me. Owning three companies, doing art and graphics for all three, being a pro skater, and making music, controlling your own destiny, it always stuck with me. I always had respect for you.

THE CONTINUING TALE

Evan Pricco: How does the role of being a businessperson in the world of being a fine artist overlap?

Andy: Sadly for most artists it’s their nemesis and they literally dread it. That’s why big business has been able to “pacify” nearly every artist in the world with very little reward for creativity. Most artists just don’t want to deal with it, but avoiding the business side doesn’t

help in the long run. Somehow I was given this weird right- and left-brain combination. Warhol called it Business Art. I see so much creativity in entrepreneurialism, so many different ways to solve challenges creatively. In the early 90s I resisted, telling myself “you’re an artist, stay in the studio,” but always found myself creating complex ideas that needed a sophisticated plan to achieve, sometimes an idea for an art exhibition, sometimes a product or brand. Once I came to terms with the fact that I’m both an artist and an entrepreneur, I was able to minimize the time it took to move from one side of my brain to the other.

Is it of much benefit to go into a situation as an artist and be able to

flip the switch naturally?

It’s incredibly empowering, and most traditional business executives have had a hard time believing that the person negotiating with them could also be the person providing the art and creative ideas. It’s a rarity, definitely, but something that has given me incredible opportunities. I’ve been able to learn and build working relationships with very powerful music, media, and mainstream brands while still living my life creatively.

The museum show you have coming up has been a big undertaking, so I wonder if having both the artistic and business sense has made this process easier?

Yes, definitely. This is an Artsprojekt exhibition called 43,000 Crimes: The Collaboration Conspiracy. I wanted to use an art institution as the platform, effectively dissolving the boundaries of what kind of art belongs there. The show started with discussions around my book, Art, Skateboarding, and Life, and the idea of exhibiting my paintings. When I looked through the book, the part I really wanted to elaborate on was the collaborations with other artists and brands. I talked to painters, graphic designers, animators, photographers, fashion designers, sculptors, graff artists, pro skateboarders, film directors, new media and technology engineers, musicians, poets, even animatronics creators about the concept of cross-genre collaboration, and everyone was

excited about it. From mid-2007 until now I’ve been creating the different exhibits and planning.

Some of the artists involved include James Marshall, Shepard Fairey, El Mac, Mars1, Tilt, Hello Karpa, Luca Ionescu, Johnny Rodriguez (KMNDZ), Jose Gomez, Marke Newton, Lil Jon, Natas Kaupas, Odd Studio, Luca Ionescu, KRS One, Estevan Oriol, Dallas Austin, Rob Dyrdek, Ted Newsome, Jeff King, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Ben Woodward, Jeremy Fish, Eli Gessner, Anthony Lister, and Andrew Pommier, among others.

With this project in mind, where is the genre going?

Individuals, as I remember it, forged the roots of this movement as a

departure from the status quo, so we’ve never had a concept of limitations in terms of medium or method. Early on we drew imagery from the punk movement, painted, then made graphics, stickers, posters, and skateboards, put spray paint on walls at 2 am, created our own films, made music, formed skateboard and clothing companies, and made setups to screenprint our own t-shirts in spare bedrooms. In 1992, two years after cofounding New Deal, I created Urbanistics, a 2,000-square-foot studio warehouse with two live-in lofts, a screenprint facility, a computer lab with four Mac IIci’s, a music studio, and offices to Zero Sophisto clothing company and Underworld Element skateboards (which later became Element and Johnny overtook). I

was inspired by the idea of bringing everyone together creatively, pushing the street art aesthetic forward, and integrating this new tool for digital art into it all. I thank Warhol for inspiring that vision through his creation of the Factory. Picasso said something to the effect of “whatever you can imagine is real.” I have lived by that since day one.

The success in manifesting our own culture led us to believe that absolutely anything was achievable, so we created our own spoken and visual language. That served as an encryption of the culture, which took the mainstream over a decade to decode. In art school my instructors were actually preaching to me that the graff-style pieces I was doing weren’t art, that they

:I SEE SO MucH cREATIvITY IN ENTREpRENEuRIALISM, SO MANY DIffERENT WAYS TO SOLvE cHALLENgES cREATIvELY.”

ANDY HOWELL

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: “THE SuccESS IN MANIfESTINg OuR OWN cuLTuRE LED uS TO

bELIEvE THAT AbSOLuTELY ANYTHINg WAS AcHIEvAbLE.

would never be art. The funny thing is as they were condemning me, I was turning my homework into skate graphics, which were going out to a hundred thousand people. That was in 1989.

In art there’s a visible movement that sprung from a fusion of contemporary fine art, street art, and graphic arts, but is now its own thing. Graphic design and typography merged with illustration and painting that in many cases was a derivative of street art. Now artists are moving beyond that simple combination and have integrated every medium into the visual language. But we don’t play by the same rules as the art establishment, we never have. So I think of it as a neo-contemporary movement. It has inspired me to

come up with new ways to enable others to do the same.

As Shepard, Jon, and yourself alluded to earlier, the lifestyles you were leading back in the early 1990s has become the lifestyle that defines youth culture in 2008. You get high on your own supply thinking about that?

Are you kidding? It’s amazing to see that something we got ridiculed for so many years has come to the forefront. It’s hilarious. I’m grateful. To me it’s all art; the fine art, the commercial art, even the business of art. I see creative challenges in all of it.

Then what’s the next challenge?

There will always be the polar

extremes of fine art and commercial art, but I believe the most relevant to today’s culture is a hybrid of the two: the artist who understands how to use the commercial world to proliferate a fine art career, and vice versa. Murakami has done a great job of that in recent years, and Damien Hirst, of course.

For me everything culturally, artistically, and even technologically has merged. Individuals demanding that every aspect of life be customized and instantaneous dictate the speed of culture and art. We want it all and we want it now. So I challenged myself to combine fine art, commercial art, and technology to effectively liberate every visual artist in the world.

Artsprojekt emerged as the

solution and vehicle for that freedom of expression. It’s an artist management, exhibition, and commerce company that supports emerging artists in all fine art and commercial genres to navigate through the murky waters of the art world. Artists are represented by a team of both institutional and street level art pros who give them time to focus on making art instead of stumbling through the business of art. The company creates and manages exhibitions, sells art, and utilizes an infinite on-demand platform to allow artists and brands to create and sell products with no cost for production or inventory. Finally the artist wins.

How has parenthood affected your career?

The biggest thing about family is now there’s a reason to live. The whole process of my son True being born was amazing, surreal. It was just as much me being born; it just opened the possibility for experience to a much wider scope. I mean, he’s a collaboration between us, directly from her and me. I always lived in the zone of the in-betweens, looking in at everything, providing commentary with my art. It was love at first sight for us, and my wife Ginger (Che) is an amazing artist and inspiration. Our son True is the beautiful connection we share. They’re the loves of my life that give me a reason to wake up every day and go forward. It all makes sense now, because she’s the only person on earth who really sees all of me. Before I was just floating out there

somewhere, and now with them I’m here.

Now how much of your day do you devote to painting?

I’m creating something every second. Its not always painting. I wake up with True and start beatboxing, and he just starts laughing. I get up and begin making things, thinking, writing, and sketching. I’m collaborating on ideas with a lot of artists right now because of the coming Artsprojekt exhibitions. I’m working at home and our art studio is less than a mile from the house, so there’s art happening all day long at one or the other. Pieces in one stage of completion or another are all over the house, and usually there’s art on the dining room table being

worked on. It’s everywhere. I’ve been traveling a lot recently with Artsprojekt, but when I’m in San Diego I work at least 12 hours a day. My favorite time is at night when everything is quiet. All nighters are common.

How often do you get bored?

I only get bored with needless repetition. It happens. I like to see things constantly evolve. For the last 10 years I’ve been part of the underground art movement and the mainstream commercial art world at the same time. The bonding element is another passion that I have been nurturing since high school: entrepreneurialism. Together the three power all my creative adventures. Right now I’m making and selling art with

amazing fine artists, commercial artists, photographers, and brands from around the world. Manifesting freedom of expression. So I’m good.

Anything to say to Lil Jon after having us over to his house for the interview?

Thanks for pushing the game forward, dude, we’ll keep it moving. You should’ve let me do that flip off your roof.

For more information about Andy Howell, contact Andyhowell.com or Artsprojekt.com.

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ANDY HOWELL

Detail of Total Confusion is Popular