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LA's skateboards started as a craft. A new exhibit looks at the art of sidewalk surfing
"Vehicles of Expression: The Craft of the Skateboard" opens this Saturday at the Craft in America in Los Angeles.
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A new exhibit in L.A. — Vehicles of Expression: The Craft of the Skateboard — arrives this weekend, highlighting the cultural impact, history and artistry of handmade skateboards.
It’s the latest exhibit at Craft in America Center, a museum and library that highlights handcrafted artwork.
Todd Huber, skateboard historian and founder of the Skateboarding Hall of Fame, said before 1962, it wasn’t possible to buy a skateboard in a store.
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“Skateboarding started as a craft,” Huber said on AirTalk, LAst 89.3’s daily news program. “Somewhere in the 50s until 1962, if you wanted to sidewalk surf, as they called it, you had to make your own out of roller skates.”
What to expect
Emily Zaiden, the director and lead curator of the Craft in America Center based in Los Angeles, told LAist’s AirTalk the exhibit was tricky to curate.
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“What we wanted to do was focus on both the history and then expand into how this has been an object that people have interpreted in so many different ways since the very beginning,” Zaiden said.
Artists who craft skateboards not only think of design, but also of the features that give riders the ability to do tricks, such as wheelies and kickflips.
“The ways that people have constructed boards, engineered boards, design boards … people are really renegade, which I think is really the spirit of skateboarding overall,” Zaiden said. “This very independent, out-of-the-box approach and making boards that allow them to do all kinds of wacky tricks and do all kinds of things that no one imagined possible physically with their body, but through the object of the board.”
Know before you go
The exhibit at Craft in America Center opens to the public on Saturday. Admission is free. The museum is open from noon to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.
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