Retna Skateboard

Born Marquis Lewis on March 24, 1979, in Los Angeles, CA, Retna joined the Los Angeles mural scene as a teenager. 

As a youth of African-American, El Salvadorian and Cherokee descent growing up in Los Angeles, Retna was mesmerized by the gang graffiti that surrounded him. He began practicing the art form and adopted the name Retna from a Wu-Tang Clan song. In the mid-nineties, he began making murals on walls, trains and freeway overpasses throughout the city. 

Retna transformed from a street artist to a break-out star in the contemporary art world. He garnered attention from Usher, an R&B artist, who commissioned the artist to create a portrait of Marvin Gaye, and MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who wrote in the September 2010 issue of Juxtapoz “one of the most exciting exhibitions...this year, anywhere, was Retna's exhibition at New Image Art.” MOCA also featured Retna's work in the major “Art in the Streets” exhibit, the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art. 

At first glance, Retna’s prints and paintings look like an undiscovered ancient script: a series of hypnotic symbols — complex, beautiful and captivating. But he has created an original alphabet, fusing together influences from ancient Incan and Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, Asian calligraphy, graffiti, blackletter, Roman lettering and Hebrew script. 

Each piece carries meaning, conveying an event or dialogue that the artist experienced. The writing does not belong to a particular language. Retna explains, “I want my text to feel universal. I want people from different cultures to all find some similarity in it — whether they can read it or not.” He has also stated that “it is important to have art in the streets as a cultural fabric that is woven into the city for the upliftment of civic pride.” 

Retna’s works are in the private collections of Jeffrey Deitch, Swizz Beats, Usher, and Dave Chappelle, among many others. His large-scale mural across the eastern exterior of Restoration Hardware’s new gallery in West Palm, Florida, was valued at $500,000 by the city’s Art in Public Places program.

Retna has collaborated with major fashion brands including Nike, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Helmut Lang, and designed the artwork for Justin Bieber’s Purpose album cover. RETNA also acted as the artistic designer for the San Francisco and Washington National Opera’s production of “Aida."

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(Biography provided by New Union Gallery)

Street art is a style created for city walls, subway trains and other public spaces. Sometimes it is commissioned, yet most often it is an individual statement of defiant free expression. Although mostly an urban style, street art can be found all over the world, including JR’s pasted portraits on the separation wall in Palestine, Invader’s playful ceramic tile mosaics in Paris and the provocative stencil and spray-paint works by Banksy in London.

The Philadelphia-based Cornbread — aka Darryl McCray — is considered the first modern graffiti artist. He began tagging his name around the city in the 1960s. Graffiti art later flourished in New York City in the 1970s. There, young artists used spray paint and markers to create tags and large-scale graphic works, with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring both developing their distinctive styles through the graffiti scene, which would evolve into street art. Artists such as Tracy 168 and Lady Pink pioneered the Wild Style of complex graffiti writing in the 1980s, pushing the movement forward.

Because of its unsanctioned, improvisational and frequently covert nature, street art involves a range of techniques and aesthetics. Some street artists use quick and effective stenciling, whereas others wheat-paste posters, commandeer video projectors or freehand draw elaborate illustrations and murals. Shepard Fairey made his mark with street art stickers before designing the iconic “Hope” poster for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

While the origins of street art are rooted in a strictly noncommercial creative act that confronted political issues, sexuality and more for a general audience of passersby, the art form has moved inside the galleries over the years. Today, just as Basquiat and Haring took their works from Manhattan’s Lower East Side alleyways into Soho galleries, artists including KAWS, Barry McGee and Osgemeos are in demand with collectors of fine art.

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