8.0 Maple Wood Skateboard with screen print and 1 3⁄4 drilled hole.
Artist Nayland Blake has produced a new limited edition skateboard on the occasion of Printed Matter’s participation in Frieze New York 2022. Boards For Glory is their tribute to skate culture and public sex. They write: “Skaters and Cruisers remap the public terrain to suit their purposes beyond the boundaries of the law. This is a platform and a peephole.” Since the late 1980s, Nayland Blake’s influential body of work has explored themes of play, eroticism, and the subjective experiences of desire, power, and loss. Inspired by feminist theory and queer subcultures, Blake addresses the contradictions of representation in sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, particularly as it relates to their own identity as a nonbinary multiracial artist.
Nayland Blake is an artist and educator whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum and many others. They were most recently the subject of the retrospective exhibition No Wrong Holes: Thirty Years of Nayland Blake at the ICA LA and The MIT List Center. Their work is currently on view as part of the Whitney Biennial. For the exhibition, Blake re-created the facade of the Mineshaft, a members-only gay sex club, bar legendary as a playground for sexual adventure and was a major cultural force in New York night life, that operated from 1976 to 1985 around the corner from the Whitney.
