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ARTISTS INSPIRED BY MUSIC: INTERSCOPE REIMAGINED
MANAGING EDITOR | WRITER | JANUARY 2022
Here are a few selects from this extraordinary publication bringing the world’s greatest visual artists together with the greatest musical ones to celebrate Interscope Records’ 30th Anniversary.


Richard Prince b. 1949 | Panama Canal Zone Richard Prince is a painter and photographer, best known as a pioneer of Appropriation Art. While living in New York in the late 70s, he prepared magazine clippings for Time-Life spurring his fascination with advertising and consumer imagery. He began creating works based on various pop culture images taken from magazines and newspapers, often re-photographing and manipulating the images in his own works. The majority of his works includes scandalous sub-ject matter and has provoked controversy around issues of copyright in the art world. His famous Cowboys series of 80s photographs was appropriated from Marlboro ad campaigns. Of his controversies was his show at the Frieze Art Fair in 2015 when he simply took Instagram images belonging to public accounts and recontextualized them as high art that sold for upwards of 90K. From his studio in New York, Prince continues making art that incites. Kehinde Wiley b. 1977 | Los Angeles, California Los Angeles born, and now New York-based, visual artist, Kehinde Wiley has firmly situat-ed himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. He’s a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, among oth-ers. But he’s best known for his presidential portrait of Barack Obama. Wiley, engages the rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban, black and brown men found throughout the world. The work often blurs the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation. Rendering his figures in a realistic mode—while making references to specific Old Master paintings—Wiley creates a fusion of period styles and influences, ranging from French Rococo, Islamic architecture, and West African textile design, to urban hip-hop and the... Ferrari Sheppard b. 1962 | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Blurring the lines between abstraction and figuration, the contemporary artist Ferrari Sheppard creates mid to large-scale paintings celebrating the humanity of Black peo-ple in the Americas and within the diaspora. The Los Angeles-based artist was born in Chicago and lived in various cities in Africa. His paintings are influenced by memories and lived experience, evoking nostalgia. Sheppard heralds a new visual language using large acrylic, charcoal and 24K gold on his canvas to convey movement and emotion. The abstracted figures are created with an intuitive balance holding s Raymond Pettibon b. 1957 | Tucson, Arizona When a band of punk rockers in 80s Southern California needed an identity, frontman and founder Greg Ginn asked his brother Raymond Pettibon. Pettibon suggested the words “black”, ”flag.” He would go on to design what might essentially be considered the emblem of hardcore punk: four black bars billowing as a flag. He did many visuals for SST Records before becoming widely known as a fine artist. His work utilizes a vast array of American iconography stemming from literature and philosophy, sports and mass media. His practice often uses satire to convey social critique on American political culture and the importance of modern art. Predominantly working in India ink and paper, he has an ongoing project produc-ing highly sought-after booklets comprised of limited-edition photocopies of his drawings. Shepard Fairey b. 1970 | Charleston, South Carolina Shepard Fairey changed the world’s perspectives about street art with his infamous OBEY sticker campaign in 1989. While it was intended for his own circle of skate-boarder and artist friends, the image began cropping up in ever-wider public spac-es. The context-less ambiguity of the image, as it resided within community space, was an exercise in Heidegger’s assertion of “letting things manifest for themselves.” The sticker became so ubiquitous in NYC streets that in retrospect it can be seen as an early example of viral imagery. He describes the seminal sticker work as an “experiment in phenomenology” and went on to use public space as a medium for his forays into sociological responses and community space. To date, Fairey has painted more than 110 large scale murals across six continents worldwide. After more than 30 years, his work has evolved into an acclaimed oeuvre, including the 2008 Hope... Nicolas Party b. 1980 | Lausanne, Switzerland Nicolas Party is a New York-based artist who works across the disci-plines of painting, drawing, sculpture and performance. Party’s por-traits and still lifes are frequently rendered in soft pastel and conveyed in a range of palettes and fantastical settings. His androgynous, bio-morphic subjects challenge the normative codes of representation-al painting. Blended by hand, Party’s lustrous, jewel-toned murals create immersive environments which skew perspective and expand beyond the picture plane. Party’s fascination with the natural world, and the characters which inhabit it, is faithful to the combined leg-acies of Classical antiquity, Renaissance painting, late 19th-century Romanticism, and 20th-century figurative painting. Damien Hirst b. 1965 | Bristol, England One of the Young British Artists (YBAs) who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s, Damien Hirst has sold out shows around the world of vivisected cattle and dead butterflies. Death is a central theme in his works and dead animals (including animals from a zebra to a bear) are preserved in formaldehyde, sometimes having been dissected. The most notorious of these was The Phys-ical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot (4.3m) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a clear display case. In addition to his glass tank works, Hirst has made paintings and sculptures exploring our pharmacological age. He is report-edly the UK’s richest living artist, with his wealth estimated at $384 million in the 2020 Sunday Times Rich List. Reggie Burrows Hodges b. 1965 | Compton, California Reggie Burrows is a Maine-based painter whose visual metaphors tell stories of identity, community, truth and memory. His chalky relaxed figures seep out of dark ground to toy with perceptions, and the politics of space. He asks us to consider surroundings as we would people. His characters take up the canvas but they are not the main focus. Identifying features are subtracted. Bodies are depicted softly, surroundings are hazy and the work examines the imprecision of memory, and the significance of environment in shaping who we become. Rashid Johnson b. 1977 | Chicago, Illinois Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work uses a diverse range of media to ex-plore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality and critical history. After studying in the photography department of the Art Institute of Chicago, Johnson’s practice quickly expanded to embrace a wide range of media–including sculpture, painting, drawing, film-making, installation. He creates a complex multidisciplinary prac-tice, rich with symbolism and personal history. The work includes CB radios, shea butter, literature, record covers, gilded rocks, black soap and tropical plants. Takashi Murakami b. 1962 | Tokyo, Japan Drawing from traditional Japanese painting, sci-fi, anime and the global art market, Takashi Murakami creates paintings, sculptures, and films populated by repeated motifs and mutating characters of his own creation. His work also extends to mass-produced items such as toys, keychains and t-shirts. Murakami’s wide-ranging out-put embodies an intersection of pop culture, history and fine art. Since the early 1990s, he’s invented characters that combine as-pects of popular cartoons from Japan, Europe and the US. Muraka-mi’s figures act as icons and symbols—hosts for more complex themes of violence, technology and fantasy. While Murakami’s im-agery may appear to present unprecedented characters and forms, many contain explicit art historical references and some are even direct contemporary updates on traditional Japanese works. Sayre Gomez b. 1982 | Chicago, Illinois Sayre Gomez works across mediums to address modes of perception and representation in current socio-political systems. He largely sources his material from stock photogra-phy and found images, often harvested from the internet. Those texts are then processed through his filters of detail using airbrush and stencils, and trompe l'oeil . The paintings are inspired by the tableaus of Los Angeles. He portrays photorealistic yet imaginary imagery to posit an ambiguity to his viewers: blurred considerations asking what is real and what is construct. Responding to a culture of rapid technology and accelerated image creation, his work beckons to more metaphysical spaces. Windows, storefronts, billboards and other city motifs depict a departure point from which to survey the psychology of place. When is something authentic, and when is it simulation? He asks us again in this piece for 50 Cent’s, Get Rich or Die Tryin’; also, those aren’t stickers on the cover, they’re painted.


Editor-in-Chief | Marvin Scott Jarrett
Design Director | Gary Koepke
Executive Editor | Josh Jones
Managing Editor | Sarah Awan
Artist Profiles | Sarah Awan
Design Associate | John T. Perry III
Picture Editor | Matt Richardson
PUBLISHED BY MARVIN MEDIA © 2022