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Skateboarding saved my life! As both an activity and culture, skateboarding blew the doors open for me to see how creativity, fearlessness, independence, and style could let me paint my own story. To paraphrase Charles Bukowski, everything, worth saying or doing, dull or dangerous, is better with style. I learned the importance of style from skateboarding, but I apply style to my art and pretty much anything else I can. My friend Blaize Blouin, the only pro skater from Charleston S.C., where I grew up, used to say, “trendy tricks come and go, but the need for style is constant.”
Juice Magazine has been a voice for core skateboarding, music, and art for 25 years. They did their first feature on me in 1998, and we’ve worked together many times over the years. Running a print mag is always a tough business for love, not money, but is especially challenging during a pandemic. Juice is in financial distress, and I want to help and pay my proper respects to style in skateboarding, but also paying my respects to authentic voices in skateboard culture who chronicle the past and the future. I will be releasing art soon with proceeds to help Juice stay in business, but for now, they have a GoFundMe you can support to keep them in print. Thanks for caring!
-Shepard
“Since day one, Shepard Fairey has been a pioneer and his art continually evokes emotion and reflects his unique style. Skateboarding has always been a driving force in his life, and skateboarding, like art, encourages freedom of expression. Just as the parallels of skateboarding and art exist, so do the parallels of Shepard Fairey and Juice Magazine. Our devotion to skateboarding, art and music were both sparked in the Carolinas, stoked in the Northeast and fired to a full blaze in California. While Shepard pursued his natural instincts to intertwine skateboarding and punk rock into his art, Juice set off on a journey to provide a platform for those voices most crucial to the roots of skate, surf, music and art culture. Our time in Los Angeles has given us both access to the long revered birthplaces of surf skate style and honored us with the opportunity to work with the innovators that drew us here. During our adventures here in the Wild Wild West, timeless truths have been discovered and re-discovered: ‘History repeats itself.’ ‘Style is everything.’ ‘If you fall, get back up.’ During the challenging times of the COVID 19 pandemic, the reality hit that Juice might not weather this storm. Thankfully, our skate family has stepped up and offered us a chance to save the day. We would like to thank our friend, Shannon Smith, for setting up the Help Save Juice GoFundMe and we would like to recognize and send our appreciation for the commitment of the skateboarding hardcores who have always had our back. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Hugh Holland for this timeless image that captures the idea that “Styles change. Style endures.” Lastly, we want to say a very special thank you to Shepard Fairey for his inspiring art, his kindness, his unrelenting fight for what is right and his contributions to the Juice cause. With the help of our skate, art and music family, we will continue to spotlight pivotal moments in skate, surf, art and punk rock and celebrate the thrill inherent in the simplistic motion of carving a schoolyard bank on a wooden toy.”
– Terri Craft, Juice Magazine
