Unit 16 · Culture, Art and Who Skates

The first store-made skateboards, sold around 1959 and through the early 1960s, looked a lot like small surfboards. Many were plain wood, sometimes painted one color, with a company name stamped or printed on top. Their job was to be ridden and sold, not to be looked at. A deck graphic is the art printed on a skateboard deck, usually on the bottom, and in those years there was very little of it.

That changed in the 1970s and especially the 1980s. Companies built teams of sponsored skaters, and each top skater could get a pro model, a deck sold with that skater’s name and their own graphic. A skater’s board became a kind of flag. Young riders bought the deck of the skater they admired, so the picture on the bottom had to be strong enough to be seen across a skatepark or in a magazine photo.

The bottom of the deck became the canvas for a practical reason. The top is covered with grip tape, a sandpaper-like sheet that keeps shoes from slipping, so art there disappears. The bottom shows when a skater flies out of a ramp, flips the board or carries it. The bottom also gets scraped by rails, ledges and curbs, so every graphic slowly wears away. Many skaters see that wear as part of the board’s story.

Jim Phillips was an artist from Santa Cruz, California, who drew for surf culture before he drew for skateboards. He became the main graphic artist for Santa Cruz, a skateboard company, from the 1970s into the 1990s. His style used thick black outlines, bright flat colors and wild cartoon energy. You can recognize it from across a room.

His most famous image is the Screaming Hand, a blue hand with an open, yelling mouth in its palm. It first appeared in the mid-1980s and has been printed on decks, shirts, stickers and wheels ever since. A graphic that a company uses again and again, until people know the company from the picture alone, works like a logo. The Screaming Hand became exactly that for Santa Cruz.

Phillips also designed graphics for individual pro models, matching each picture to a skater’s name or personality. His work shows that deck art was not decoration added at the end. It was planned art made for a long, narrow shape with rounded ends, a hard space to fill well. Later artists studied how he used that shape, placing the main image so it still read clearly when the board was moving.

Powell Peralta was a California skateboard company started by George Powell and Stacy Peralta in the late 1970s. Its team, the Bones Brigade, included young skaters such as Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain, Mike McGill and Rodney Mullen. The company needed a look as strong as the team, and the artist who gave it one was Vernon Courtland Johnson, often called VCJ.

Johnson drew detailed skulls, skeletons, snakes and dragons in pen and ink, full of fine lines and shading. His skull-and-sword design became a symbol of the company and the team. He also drew pro model graphics fitted to each rider, such as a dragon for Steve Caballero and a hawk-like skull for Tony Hawk. The images looked a little dangerous, which fit the way skating felt to many teenagers in the 1980s.

Johnson’s graphics did more than sell boards. They tied together the decks, the team, the magazine ads and the company’s videos into one recognizable world. Placing Jim Phillips’s bold cartoons next to Johnson’s fine-lined skulls shows two very different answers to the same problem. Both artists made a narrow wooden board into something people wanted to keep, frame and remember decades later.

A magazine called The Quarterly Skateboarder first appeared in 1964, during the first boom. It soon became SkateBoarder. When the boom faded around 1965 and 1966, the magazine stopped. It came back in the mid-1970s, after urethane wheels brought skating back to life, and for the rest of the decade it was the main way most skaters outside California saw what was happening.

In the mid-1970s SkateBoarder ran a series of articles and photos about the Zephyr team from Santa Monica and Venice, California, an area some locals called Dogtown. Craig Stecyk wrote and photographed many of them, and Glen E. Friedman, a teenager at the time, took photos of the same skaters. Their pictures showed Tony Alva, Jay Adams, Peggy Oki, Stacy Peralta and others riding low and aggressive, like surfers on concrete.

These were not posed portraits. They were action photography: pictures taken in the middle of a move, often in empty backyard swimming pools during the 1976 to 1977 drought. A reader in another state could study a photo and copy a skater’s crouch, arm position and line. In 2001 Stacy Peralta made Dogtown and Z-Boys, a documentary film that retold this story using many of those photos.

By the early 1980s many skateparks had closed over insurance costs, and SkateBoarder magazine had changed direction. Skaters moved to backyard ramps, empty lots and city streets. Two new magazines followed them. Thrasher started in San Francisco in 1981. TransWorld SKATEboarding started in Southern California in 1983.

Thrasher had a rough, loud voice. It covered backyard ramps, street skating and punk bands, and its slogan, "Skate and Destroy," matched that attitude. TransWorld tended toward cleaner layouts and a slightly calmer tone, with long photo features and interviews. Skaters often argued about which one they liked better. Having both meant more photographers, writers and skaters got paid and seen.

Both magazines relied on the sequence, a row of photos taken a fraction of a second apart that shows a trick from start to finish. A sequence lets a reader see where the feet go at each moment, which a single photo cannot do. Thrasher later began naming a Skater of the Year, a title many skaters still treat as one of the highest honors in the sport. Many of the best-known skate photographers built their careers shooting for these two magazines.

A good skate photo usually catches the peak of a trick: the highest point of an ollie, the middle of a grind, the instant a flipped board lines up under the feet. That moment lasts a tiny fraction of a second. The photographer has to know the trick well enough to press the shutter just before it, because there is always a small delay between seeing and pressing.

Many skate photographers use a fisheye lens, a very wide lens that bends straight lines into curves and lets the camera get close to the skater while still showing the whole obstacle. Others stand far back with a long lens to show the size of a spot. Portable flash units, small bright lights fired for a split second, freeze motion and light a skater who is in shadow. Photographers often place two or three flashes around a spot before the skater tries anything.

Shooting a trick can take many tries. A skater may need dozens of attempts to land it, and the photographer needs one try where the landing, the angle and the light all work. That shared work builds trust between skater and photographer. Today a phone can shoot bursts of many frames per second, so anyone can try this at a local park, as long as they stand well out of the skater’s path.

In 1984 Powell Peralta released The Bones Brigade Video Show, directed by Stacy Peralta. It came out on VHS, the home videotape format of the 1980s, so a skater could watch it on a family TV and rewind a trick again and again. Magazines could show a sequence of a few photos. A video showed the whole run, with speed, sound and timing.

Powell Peralta followed with Future Primitive in 1985 and The Search for Animal Chin in 1987. These videos mixed real skating with short scenes and jokes, and they made the Bones Brigade skaters famous far from California. Skaters copied tapes for friends, and shops played them on TVs. A teenager in a small town could now see Tony Hawk or Steve Caballero ride a ramp in real time.

Video changed how people learned. A skater could pause a tape on the frame where the back foot snapped the tail, then play it in slow motion. Some skaters say they learned their first tricks from a paused VHS tape. It also changed what a professional skater was. A pro now had to be filmed well, not just win contests, and the video part, a skater’s own section of a video, became a major event.

By the early 1990s many skaters rode city streets: curbs, ledges, benches, stairs and handrails. Video followed them. Blind’s Video Days came out in 1991, directed by Spike Jonze, who later became a well-known film director. It followed a small group of skaters, including Mark Gonzales, Jason Lee and Guy Mariano, through their city. Its loose, personal style felt like hanging out with friends, and many skaters still name it among the most important skate videos.

Plan B’s Questionable came out in 1992. It showed highly technical street skating, with flip tricks and long grinds done on everyday city objects. Watching it, viewers could see how far flat-ground tricks had come since Rodney Mullen’s early-1980s work. Each skater’s part was edited to a chosen song, so the rhythm of the music and the rhythm of the tricks matched.

These videos show skate filmmaking as an art. The filmer picks the angle, follows the skater while rolling on a board, and decides what to keep. The editor chooses the order of tricks, the song and the ender, the last and usually hardest trick in a part. Many famous street spots seen in these videos were private or not meant for skating, and rules there varied; skaters learning today build skills at skateparks and on small, low obstacles first.

In the mid-1990s Sony released the VX1000, a digital camcorder (a handheld video camera). Paired with a fisheye lens, it became a standard tool for skate filmers for years. Its look, sharp and close with curved edges, is still copied on purpose today. Full-length videos moved from VHS to DVD around the early 2000s, often with extra footage and behind-the-scenes clips.

The internet changed the speed of everything. YouTube launched in 2005, and Instagram in 2010. A trick filmed in the morning could be seen around the world by night. Short clips, often under a minute, became as important as long videos. Skaters in Brazil, Japan, South Africa or Illinois could build an audience without a magazine or a company choosing them first.

Something was gained and something changed. More people can share their skating, including girls, older skaters, adaptive riders and skaters far from California, who once rarely appeared in magazines. At the same time, a constant stream of clips can make a full video part, planned and edited over a year or more, feel rare. Many skaters still treat a full part as the highest form of the art.

In the early 1980s, as skating moved to backyards and streets, many skaters listened to punk rock: short, fast, loud songs, often made cheaply by young bands. Punk’s attitude of making things yourself, without asking permission from big companies, fit skating at that time. Some skaters played in bands, and Thrasher covered punk music alongside skating and put out compilation tapes of what it called skate rock.

In the 1990s hip-hop became just as important. Street skating and hip-hop both grew in cities and both treated everyday places, a plaza or a corner, as a stage. Video parts were set to rap, soul, jazz and rock, and the song a skater chose said something about who they were. A part’s music could make a run feel smooth and stylish or wild and fast.

Music also carried skating to new people. When the video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater came out in 1999, its soundtrack mixed punk and hip-hop. Many players heard those bands and rappers for the first time while playing. Today the song choice in a video part is still treated as part of the art, and filmers sometimes edit each trick to land on a beat.

A zine (say "zeen") is a small, homemade magazine, often typed or handwritten, cut and pasted together, photocopied and stapled. In the 1980s and 1990s skaters made zines about their local crews, spots and bands, and traded or mailed them to each other. A zine needed no publisher and no advertisers. It needed a copy machine, some photos and someone who cared.

This habit is called DIY, short for do it yourself. When many skateparks closed in the early 1980s, skaters built wooden half-pipes and mini ramps in backyards, sometimes from plans printed in magazines. In 1990 skaters in Portland, Oregon, began pouring concrete under the Burnside Bridge without permission. The city later accepted Burnside skatepark, and it became famous around the world. In London, skaters have used the Southbank undercroft since the 1970s, and the Long Live Southbank campaign kept it open with an agreement in 2014.

DIY is a way of seeing a place and asking what it could become. It also comes with real responsibilities. Building on land you do not own can be illegal and unsafe, and good DIY projects today often work with a city or landowner, as Burnside eventually did. The same spirit drives skaters who make their own videos, photos, shirts and art, and who teach each other at the local park.

The first National Skateboard Championships were held in Anaheim, California, in 1965, and ABC’s Wide World of Sports showed them on television. Patti McGee won the women’s national title. At a time when many people thought of skating as something only boys did, a young woman was the champion on national TV.

That same year Life magazine, one of the most widely read magazines in the United States, put McGee on its cover. The photo showed her doing a handstand on a moving skateboard, barefoot, with her body straight above the board. A handstand on a rolling board takes strength, balance and practice. The cover carried skateboarding, and a woman skater, into millions of homes.

The first boom faded around 1965 and 1966, and many contests stopped. McGee’s place in the story stayed, though. Later women skaters have named her as proof that girls were part of skateboarding from the start. Her story is a reminder that the record of who skated depends partly on who was photographed and written about, and that being seen can open a door for others.

In the mid-1970s the Zephyr team came out of a surf shop in Santa Monica, California, near Venice. Its skaters, including Tony Alva, Jay Adams and Stacy Peralta, rode low to the ground, dragging a hand on the concrete the way a surfer touches a wave. Peggy Oki was the only woman on the original team, and she rode in that same style.

At the Del Mar Nationals in 1975, the Zephyr skaters surprised the crowd and the judges. Most competitors did upright freestyle routines. The Zephyr team crouched, carved hard and slid their boards in long, surf-like turns. Oki competed there with her teammates. Her skating showed that this new, aggressive style was not something only boys could do.

Oki later turned much of her energy to art, working as a painter. For later women who discovered the Zephyr story through magazines and the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, she became an important figure. Seeing one woman in a famous team photo showed many girls a place for themselves in the story.

In the late 1970s a few women, such as Laura Thornhill and Ellen O’Neal, rode for companies and appeared in magazines, mostly in freestyle: tricks done on flat ground, often in a planned routine. When many skateparks closed in the early 1980s, contests for everyone shrank, and women’s events often disappeared first. For years many girls who skated rarely saw another woman at the park or in a magazine.

In the 1990s and 2000s more women turned pro in street and vert skating. Elissa Steamer, a street skater, became the first woman included in the video game Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in 1999. Millions of players saw her listed beside men. Women’s events were added at more contests, but they often paid much less, had less TV time and were sometimes cut with little warning.

Women skaters answered by organizing. In the late 2000s a group of women pros pushed the X Games to pay women and men the same prize money, and the contest agreed. When skateboarding entered the Olympics, women and men had the same number of events, street and park for each. That equal structure was the result of decades of women showing up, skating and asking.

The IOC added skateboarding to the Olympic program in 2016, and it debuted at the Tokyo 2020 Games, held in 2021 because of the pandemic. In women’s street, Momiji Nishiya of Japan won gold at age 13, and Rayssa Leal of Brazil, also 13, won silver. A podium is the stand where the top three finishers receive medals, and two of the three spots belonged to 13-year-olds.

In women’s park at Tokyo, Sakura Yosozumi of Japan won gold, Kokona Hiraki of Japan won silver at age 12, and Sky Brown, 13, won bronze for Great Britain. At Paris 2024, Arisa Trew of Australia won women’s park gold, and Coco Yoshizawa of Japan won women’s street gold. Rayssa Leal earned a second Olympic medal in Paris, a bronze in street.

These results drew huge attention to girls’ skating. News stories in several countries described more girls trying skating after the Games. The medalists also showed how young skaters can build very high skill when they start early and practice often, with coaching and support. Olympic results are official records kept by the IOC and World Skate, the sport’s international federation.

For much of skating’s history, magazines and videos mostly showed young men, often white and often from California. That did not mean only those people skated. Girls, older people, skaters of color and skaters in other countries were at parks and on streets, but they appeared in print much less. A role model is a person others look up to and learn from, and many skaters went years without seeing one who looked like them.

Coverage tends to feed itself. Companies sponsored the skaters who appeared in magazines, magazines photographed sponsored skaters, and young people copied what they saw. Breaking that loop took skaters, photographers and editors who chose to show more kinds of people. Online video helped too, because skaters could post their own clips without waiting to be chosen.

In media, representation means who is shown and how. Today it is common to see women, adaptive riders and skaters from many countries in contests, videos and ads. Skate groups often say that seeing someone like you on a board makes the first visit to a park feel possible. For a beginner, a single friendly face at the park can do the same thing.

Ray Barbee grew up skating in San Jose, California, and joined Powell Peralta’s Bones Brigade in the late 1980s. He was one of the few Black skaters on a famous team at a time when most skate magazines showed few skaters of color. His part in the 1989 Powell Peralta video Ban This made many viewers notice how relaxed and smooth street skating could look.

Barbee’s style used flat ground and small objects rather than big ramps. He linked tricks such as no-complies, manuals and quick turns into one flowing line. A line is a series of tricks done one after another in a single run, without stopping. Watching a good line is a little like watching a dancer move across a stage.

Barbee is also a musician who plays guitar, and he later released his own records. Many skaters point to him as an example that style, meaning how a trick looks and feels, matters as much as difficulty. He showed young Black skaters someone like them in the most famous skate videos of the time, and he has stayed part of the skate community for decades.

Stevie Williams grew up in Philadelphia and became known in the 1990s skating Love Park, a downtown plaza with granite ledges and steps that drew skaters from around the world. He turned pro young and, in the early 2000s, started his own skateboard company, DGK. Owning a company meant he could sponsor and promote other skaters, many from city neighborhoods like his own, instead of waiting for others to choose them.

Love Park also shows how cities and skaters have argued over public space. Philadelphia restricted skating there in the early 2000s, and many skaters and fans pushed back. The fight showed how much a spot can matter to a community. Questions about where skating is allowed are still debated in many cities.

Nyjah Huston, born in 1994, became one of the most successful contest skaters in history. He has won many titles in Street League Skateboarding, a street contest series, and many X Games medals. He competed for the United States at Tokyo 2020 and won bronze in men’s street at Paris 2024. Huston and Williams, in different ways, showed young skaters of color a clear path to the top of the sport.

Skateboarding spread far beyond the United States. Brazil has one of the largest skate communities in the world, with busy public parks and many skaters in street, park and vert. Bob Burnquist, who grew up in Brazil, became a famous vert skater at the X Games. At the Olympics, Rayssa Leal won a medal for Brazil in women’s street at both Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024.

Japan’s results were just as striking. At Tokyo 2020, Yuto Horigome won the first Olympic gold in men’s street, in the city where he grew up. Momiji Nishiya won women’s street gold and Sakura Yosozumi won women’s park gold. At Paris 2024, Horigome won men’s street again and Coco Yoshizawa won women’s street gold.

Strong scenes like these usually grow from many small things: public parks, local shops, coaches, friends who skate together and families who support practice. Skaters in Australia, South Africa, Europe and many other places have their own histories too. The global spread of skating means a beginner today can find a crew, a video or a role model from almost anywhere.

WCMX, short for wheelchair motocross, means riding a skatepark’s ramps, bowls and ledges in a wheelchair. Riders use strong, specially built chairs, often with extra wheels or suspension, and they wear helmets and pads like any skater. The same ideas apply as on a board: lean into a ramp, keep your weight centered, and learn to fall safely before trying bigger moves.

Aaron Fotheringham, from Las Vegas, was born with spina bifida and has used a wheelchair for most of his life. As a boy he rode at a skatepark with his brother, who rode a BMX bike. In the mid-2000s he landed the first wheelchair backflip, rolling up a ramp and turning a full circle backward in the air before landing. Clips of it spread widely online, and he later performed in live action-sports shows around the world.

Adaptive skating is a wider family. It includes wheelchair riders, skaters with prosthetic legs, skaters who are blind or have low vision, and people who ride sitting or kneeling on a board. The word adaptive means changing the equipment or the way a skill is done so it fits a person’s body. Many parks now hold adaptive sessions, and riders teach each other new ways to drop in, turn and fall.

Skateistan began in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2007, founded by Oliver Percovich, an Australian skater. It used skateboarding to bring children into a safe place and into classes, and it made a special effort to welcome girls. It later opened programs in other countries, including Cambodia and South Africa. Its work showed that a skateboard can be a doorway to school and community.

In the United States, the Tony Hawk Foundation began in 2002 to help communities build public skateparks, especially in places with few resources. It was renamed The Skatepark Project in 2020. Local groups add to this work by running girls' sessions, adaptive sessions, older-adult sessions and free loaner gear, often at quiet hours when the park is less crowded.

These groups use a few simple moves that any park can copy. They lend helmets and pads so cost is not a barrier. They set times when beginners will not feel rushed. They train volunteers to teach, starting on grass or flat ground. Most of all, they make sure a new person is greeted by name. A barrier is anything that keeps someone from starting, such as cost, fear, distance or not seeing anyone like you.

A busy skatepark has no referee, so riders follow unwritten rules called park etiquette. Wait at the edge and take turns dropping in. Look before you roll so you do not cut across someone’s path. Do not sit on obstacles or stand in landing zones. If you fall, move off quickly. These habits keep a park safe for a nine-year-old, a sixty-year-old and a wheelchair rider at the same time.

Belonging also comes from small social habits. Experienced skaters often cheer when someone lands a first trick, even a very small one, and that cheer means a lot to a beginner. Tapping a board on the ground is a common way to applaud. Older skaters and adults starting late are part of this too; many parks now see people in their forties, fifties and older learning for the first time or coming back.

Skating has always mixed many kinds of people, even when photos did not show it. The doors opened by Patti McGee, Peggy Oki, Ray Barbee, Elissa Steamer, Aaron Fotheringham, the teenage Olympic medalists and countless local volunteers make today’s parks more open than ever. A community is a group of people who share a place or an interest and look out for each other. Every rider can help build one.