All Decked Out
Art for the Soul Gallery, Springfield, MA • artforthesoulgallery.com • June 10–September 10, 2023
All Decked Out celebrates skateboard decks reimagined into art. Art for the Soul Gallery championed the project in conjunction with its Transformational Arts and Culture Project. Honoring the legacy of the young skateboarder for which it is named, Gio’s Ollie Session is an endeavor funded by a Mass Development grant and a collaboration between the towns of Chicopee, Springfield, and Holyoke. The gateway city partnership promotes safety, advances inclusivity, and breaks down stigmas around skateboard culture.
In its second year, the grant was due in large part to the efforts of Art for the Soul Gallery owner, Rosemary Tracy Woods. Billy Myers, the Gallery’s artistic director, agrees. “We need to give one hundred percent credit to [Rosemary] Tracy… She wanted to include all of the cities surrounding Springfield.” In February 2022, Springfield’s Park Commission voted to build a new bike and skate park. Art for the Soul has hosted paint parties for young skateboarders along with safety gatherings.
The show will include roughly thirty artists. Anticipated submissions include John Longbow of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations who resides in New Mexico. Longbow designs guitars and is creating a stringed deck meant to be played. An artist himself, Myers is an art conservator specializing in period frames and altar pieces. His deck has been spliced in half to resemble an altar and mounted in a gold frame. “Some of these boards won’t even look like skateboards,” he says.
Artist Ryan Murray used the deck as a traditional canvas. “I’ve never worked on a skateboard before… I approached it the same way I would paint one of my vinyl records and just had fun with it, using a graffiti motif I was familiar with,” he says.
The exhibition coincides with Go Skate Date on June 21, 2023, and Theory Skate Shop, who provided the decks, plans to set up ramps and offer demonstrations.
“It’s time we changed people’s perceptions about skateboarding,” says Woods. After the exhibition, the works will be auctioned for a fundraiser. Other artists include: Paul Goodnight, Larry Poncho Brown, Dean Nimmer, Paul Midura, Nora Valdez, Marc Brown, Michael Tillyer, Anthony Melting Tallow, Peter Dellert, Scott Swan, and Richard Bulda.
— Jennifer Mancuso