As a teenager in Orange County in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Ed Templeton (b. 1972, Huntington Beach) helped revitalize skateboarding through his activities as part of a small group that skated on elements of urban infrastructure such as handrails, curbs, and staircases. This kind of street skating, like graffiti, required an inventive use of the urban environment. In 1993, a few years after he turned pro, Templeton formed Toy Machine Bloodsucking Skateboard Company to allow him to steer the art and sport of skateboarding in a more personal direction, creating the company’s board graphics. In 1993, he exhibited his artwork—typically comprising portraits of human figures in profile paired with text—for the first time. In 1995, sensing that the peripheral sights of his skating tours were worth documenting, he began taking photographs—not of the skating itself, but of the young people who attended the competitions and the familiar suburban landscapes they grew up in. His resulting installations of clustered photographs, paintings, and drawings have been widely exhibited around the world.
Art in the Streets, the first major historical exhibition of graffiti and street art organized by an American museum, surveys the origins and history of the movement in the United States and traces its influence as it spread around the world. Privacy Policy