A show at Make.Shift celebrates the connection between skateboarding and artistic expression.
When Kelly Sorbel put out a call for submissions to a skateboard deck art show at Make.Shift in downtown Bellingham, artists and skaters responded in droves.
“It just kind of blew up,” Sorbel said. The call, posted in January, spread across social media and Make.Shift ended up receiving 103 boards from artists ages 6 to around 60, according to Sorbel. Romain Hurdequint mailed a board from France. A handful of other boards arrived from California. The exhibit, which runs through the end of March, raised $4,000 for Northwest Skate Collective on opening night.
The variety of pieces at Make.Shift pays homage to the no-rules posture of skateboard art. Frogs skating in a bowl of ramen? Sure. A realistic rendering of a snow-capped Shuksan? Absolutely. An anatomical heart with a face and a beard? Sick. Artists used media ranging from paint and collage to quilting and pipe-cleaner sculpture.
Make.Shift’s exhibition isn’t the first foray of skateboard graphics into the world of fine art. Skate decks have graced gallery walls across the globe and sold for thousands of dollars at Sotheby’s auctions. The New York Museum of Modern Art’s online shop sells boards adorned with the work of Warhol and Basquiat.
But the original galleries are skate shops. And the artists, often, are skaters themselves.
A home for the arts
Unknown Boardshop, on Champion Street just a few blocks from Make.Shift, doubles as a museum. The lower six feet of the walls are stacked with decks for sale but look higher up and you’ll see rows of small wooden boards strung together. The oldest board in Unknown’s collection, said owner Zac Garza, is from 1939. Historically, Garza explained, skaters fashioned boards with metal wheels from roller skates, meaning they were narrower than most boards for sale today.
Until the 1970s, skate deck designs were typically limited to a company’s logotype. But as skateboarding evolved, skate art evolved with it. Brands like Dogtown and Powell-Peralta gained traction, employing artists whose intricate designs would become legendary in the skate community. Pro skaters like Tony Hawk commissioned custom competition decks, or, sometimes, designed decks themselves.
“Skateboarding is an art-driven industry,” said Lynden resident Matt French, who creates art for boards, wheels and other merch for a living. “Nobody buys a skateboard without personality.”
Just as pro-skaters get their own boards, local skate shops collaborate with artists on “shop decks.” In Burlington, Hidden Wave Boardshop released a tulip-themed shop deck designed by Garza’s Unknown co-founder Graham Callan. Anacortes’s Trinity Skate collaborated with local tattoo artist Matt Farage on a shop deck last summer.
In Ferndale, Huli Board Shop is a home for Native art. Founders Hailey (Thx̱) Allen and Jesse Lien opened the shop in 2025, shortly after the inauguration of Ferndale’s new skatepark. Allen is of Yakama and Umatilla heritage and her artwork — which celebrates Indigenous women — lines the walls of Huli and appears on their shop decks. She says she’s inspired by women like Naomi Glasses, a Diné or Navajo skater and textile artist. Huli sells wares from other local Native artists and plans to collaborate on another shop deck in the future.
In Bellingham, Garza has long been a champion of local artists, working with dozens in Unknown’s 14-year tenure in the city. These collaborations tend to emerge organically; an artist wanders into Unknown, strikes up a conversation with Garza, and he invites them to design a board or another piece of merch. Sorbel has now designed six boards for Unknown, as have a number of others who were featured in the Make.Shift show.
Veda Allen, who started working at Unknown as a teenager, designed a deck for the shop in 2024. Allen grew up in Bellingham and, at just 20 years old, has already forged relationships with a collection of local businesses. Her intricate, fantastical line drawings have been featured on a Mount Baker season pass and a Tony’s Coffee cold brew bottle. When she’s not drawing, she’s probably skating.
French, too, has designed board graphics for Unknown, as have ceramics artist Zoe Petersen of Twig Earthgoods and multimedia artist and animator Craig Boush — proof, perhaps, that artists whose styles and backgrounds vary can find a common home in skate culture.
“As soon as you put (art) on a board, it’s instantly framed,” said Garza.
A creative act
The planar surface of a skateboard makes it an easy canvas, but that’s not the only reason art and skateboarding have often gone hand in hand. The sport itself fosters creativity.
“There’s no rules,” says Steve Smith, of skateboarding. “You just make it up as you go.”
Smith — a Bellingham artist also known as Stevil Kinevil — owns and operates the brand All Hail the Black Market, where he sells a variety of goods including stickers, clothing and skate decks. One deck he made found its way to the Smithsonian.
Smith started skating around age 13 and he says it helped him develop a new relationship to his environment.
“A skateboarder looks at a parking block with intent and curiosity, whereas anybody else just sees a parking block,” he said. That kind of inventive thinking encourages other forms of artistry, and also, according to other local skaters, fosters an open and creative community.
Could AI-generated graphics make a dent in skateboard art? Maybe. But the DIY ethos of the sport suggests there will always be an appetite among skaters for the human-crafted and hand-drawn.
French said he used to color some of his designs on the computer. He doesn’t fault artists who do this. But, he thought, “I’m taking away the part of (art) that I think is fun.”
He hopes that the energy he feels when making art for board can be transmitted to whoever rides it.
“If I’m having as much fun as I can throughout the process of creating this artwork,” French said, “that fun is somehow going to be received on that end.”
— By Christy Carley
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Artists, firsthand,” Oct. 3, 2025
• “All pumped up with nowhere to practice,” Sept. 10, 2025
• “Art by NW: Eduardo Fausti’s prints reflect the energy of Orcas Island,” Aug. 28, 2025
• “Indigenous fashion show a highlight of Native American Heritage Month,” Nov. 27, 2024
• “Skaters, business, Port collaborate for Bellingham waterfront skate park,” April 2, 2021