Nelson “Dedos” Garcia

Canadian (b. 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia)

Record cover for Soobax, 2004

Nelson “Dedos” Garcia is a graffiti writer, bboy (also known as a break dancer), and member of the Juno Award winning group Rascalz. In A Night in the Yard, he references the iconic skeletons from Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations to create a portrait of a graffiti writer in a train yard at night. By taking inspiration from his Latin heritage and his wife’s Xochitl Mexican roots, Dedos illustrates the fluid, flexible, and inclusive nature of hip-hop culture.

A member of the pioneering graffiti muralist AA crew, Dedos has also worked with many Canadian recording artists to create visuals for their albums and singles. In his covers, he uses collage, caricature, and tagging to add visual dimensions to the music of well-known artists like k-os, The Northern Touch All-Stars, and K’Naan. Building on this extensive graffiti background, Dedos brings to these album covers a complex visual rendering of a multiplicity of themes, issues, and concerns embedded in the songs of these artists.

Corey Bulpitt

Haida (b. 1978, Prince Rupert, British Columbia)

Spray Can Carving, 2020
sprayed paint on wood

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

Bulpitt—who holds the Haida name Taakeit Aaya or “Gifted Carver”—is an avid painter, jeweler, and wood and argillite carver. His work draws on his Haida of the Naikun Raven clan lineage and his deep roots in hip-hop culture. Bulpitt brings together graffiti writing with ancestral carving techniques. In this way, Bulpitt’s work calls to mind both street art and the practices of his great-great-grandfathers, the acclaimed nineteenth-century Haida artist Charles Edenshaw (1839–1920) and prolific argillite carver Louis Collison (1881–1970).

Curly

Canadian (b. 1976, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan)

Fantasia 1987 – Hail the Lizard King, 2020
aerosol paint on canvas

Curly is a self-taught artist moving between graffiti and fine art for more than 25 years. In Fantasia 1987 – Hail the Lizard King, Curly takes inspiration from Fantasia 1987, an iconic work of street art in Edmonton, Alberta that has inspired several generations of graffiti writers in that city. Curly’s homage to this iconic 1987 mural by the Lizard King reflects the importance of honoring hip-hop culture’s roots and the ephemerality of the graffiti artform.

EGR

Canadian (b. 1978, Burlington, Ontario)

EGR Art on Vintage Spray Cans, 2007
acrylic paint, metal

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

EGR—pronounced e-grr—is a Toronto-based artist with a background in printmaking, life drawing, illustration, and photography. With EGR Art on Vintage Spray Cans, she illustrates scenes from some of her best-known street murals—including Alley Girl from Toronto’s Graffiti Alley and Amazon Wall Mural from the rooftop wall over the Omy! Gallery—on old cans of aerosol paint. In this way, EGR preserves two elements of her work that many street artists treat as ephemeral. 

EGR’s mural Evolution of Graffiti and Revolt explores anti-graffiti sentiment in Toronto—particularly in 2011, the year she made this mural. In this work, EGR depicts community members creating and enjoying graffiti art beneath corporate billboards, while a man in a suit threatens to erase their creative expression with the white-washing of a paint gun. The mural emphasizes the tensions resulting from public policies that both foster revenue-generating advertising and discourage community-oriented artmaking.

EGR

Canadian (b. 1978, Burlington, Ontario)

Evolution of Graffiti and Revolt, 2011
aerosol paint on canvas

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

EGR—pronounced e-grr—is a Toronto-based artist with a background in printmaking, life drawing, illustration, and photography. With EGR Art on Vintage Spray Cans, she illustrates scenes from some of her best-known street murals—including Alley Girl from Toronto’s Graffiti Alley and Amazon Wall Mural from the rooftop wall over the Omy! Gallery—on old cans of aerosol paint. In this way, EGR preserves two elements of her work that many street artists treat as ephemeral. 

EGR’s mural Evolution of Graffiti and Revolt explores anti-graffiti sentiment in Toronto—particularly in 2011, the year she made this mural. In this work, EGR depicts community members creating and enjoying graffiti art beneath corporate billboards, while a man in a suit threatens to erase their creative expression with the white-washing of a paint gun. The mural emphasizes the tensions resulting from public policies that both foster revenue-generating advertising and discourage community-oriented artmaking.

STARE

Canadian (b. 1978, Montréal, Quebec)

S to the T, 2019
aerosol paint and cement on canvas

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

In 1996, STARE started working with aerosol paint around the city of Montréal—where he continues to work as a professional muralist. Beyond his home city, STARE has also created murals in Barcelona, Miami, Sao Paolo, Toronto, and Taipei. Like other graffiti works, S to the T is on a concrete surface. Graffiti writers first painted on concrete walls and other public surfaces like the exteriors of trains as a strategy to become visible and recognizable to their peers. 

Wizwon (Jayde Goodon)

Canadian (b. 1986, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan)

Record cover for Lighty/Ears Apart (double album), 2018

Wizwon is a mural, studio, and tattoo artist based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. One way that graffiti artists have expanded the art form is via album covers: this new canvas provided an avenue for emcees to stay connected with graph writers and visual artists in the hip-hop community. Displayed here is an album cover featuring work by Wizwon for the critically acclaimed Binary Star (Lighty/Ears Apart), which references, layers and riffs multiple images and iconography to produce richly dense visuals

Elicser Elliott

Canadian (b. 1979, Montréal, Quebec)

Untitled, 2010
aerosol spray paint on canvas

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

Elicser Elliott is a Toronto-based graffiti artist whose public murals often depict both fictional characters and actual people from his life. In this piece, Elliott depicts elements from the 1980s Transformers cartoon that went missing in the contemporary Hollywood film adaptation—notably the character Soundwave, a blue boombox. This boombox and its connection to hip-hop culture urges deep reflection on manufactured obsolescence and what gets lost in mass consumption and commercialization.

Kalkidan Assefa

Canadian (b. 1982, Ethiopia)

Don’t Shoot, Record cover for TimeKode X Vol. 2, 2016

Kalkidan Assefa is a visual artist and arts educator who is inspired by the activism of hip-hop culture during its early days. Assefa’s illustration—an Afro-wearing angel rising above and leading a public protest bearing names of luminaries such as Toronto’s Dudley Laws and Charles Roach alongside other people who have been central to the fight for justice, including Amadou Diallo, Sandra Bland, and Ottawa’s own Abdirahman Abdi—adorned the cover of Ottawa music group TimeKode’s TimeKode X Vol. 2 EP.

Mique Michelle

Turtle Island (b. 1985, West Nippissing, Ontario, Robinson – Huron Treaty)

Dilo, 2021
mixed media

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

Expanding and extending the power of tagging, Mique Michelle’s Dilo returns to the Indigenous names for what are called the Great Lakes today. Michelle asks, “How can we be allies or protect the water when we call it by it’s taken name?” In this piece, diverging from graffiti’s deeply urban roots, Michelle visually urges us to witness the power of naming and renaming by seeking and applying oral knowledge from community members Gary Martin, Kristin Murray, Gerry Brandon and Sophie McKeown. Her abstraction contours these bodies of water by representing the land in an assortment of light pastel colours—pink, yellow, green and orange—to contrast the deep blue of the lakes. She captures what she calls, “The overlapping, the métissage of land and language,” transforming the mural as a memorial to Indigenous names and knowledge that came before the urban landscapes that structure the possibilities of graffiti.

Mark Stoddart

Canadian (b. 1968, Nottingham, England)

Fight the Power, 2016
Somerset Velvet watercolour paper

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

With a passion for music, sports, and social activism, mixed media artist Mark Stoddart’s slogan is “Educate, Empower and Unite.” In Fight the Power, Stoddart references the 1989 Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing as he depicts the fictional character Radio Raheem—who is killed by the police at the film’s climax—with the ghost of Trayvon Martin—an unarmed Black teenager who was murdered in 2012 by his neighbour, a white man, in their Florida neighbourhood. While Lee’s film was released more than twenty years before Martin’s killing, the continuities of excessive force, a disregard for black life, and the grotesque abuse of power more than two decades later help explain the momentum of the recent protests of the Black Lives Matter movement.

MissMe

Canadian

Free Cap, 2016
collage on plywood

MissMe is a street artist who uses wheatpasting—the practice of affixing printed images and text on surfaces in public spaces with a wheat-based adhesive—to critique racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. As part of Free Cap, MissMe responds to Quebec’s ban on head coverings in her Hijab series, which features portraits of women wearing various kinds of head coverings. MissMe’s Free Cap features a poised and confident woman whose hijab is slightly covered by a baseball cap inscribed with cursive letters reading ‘Free.’ The figure’s face is framed by a lush-looking hijab, her stare is arresting, defiantly contesting the onlooker’s gaze. Ripped shreds of paper adorn the edges of the portrait, giving this piece an outdoor quality and signifying the layered nature of women’s identities, which are too often entangled in social and political power struggles.

Nelson “Dedos” Garcia

Canadian (b. 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia)

Record cover for Emcee Murda, 2004

Nelson “Dedos” Garcia is a graffiti writer, bboy (also known as a break dancer), and member of the Juno Award winning group Rascalz. In A Night in the Yard, he references the iconic skeletons from Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations to create a portrait of a graffiti writer in a train yard at night. By taking inspiration from his Latin heritage and his wife’s Xochitl Mexican roots, Dedos illustrates the fluid, flexible, and inclusive nature of hip-hop culture.

A member of the pioneering graffiti muralist AA crew, Dedos has also worked with many Canadian recording artists to create visuals for their albums and singles. In his covers, he uses collage, caricature, and tagging to add visual dimensions to the music of well-known artists like k-os, The Northern Touch All-Stars, and K’Naan. Building on this extensive graffiti background, Dedos brings to these album covers a complex visual rendering of a multiplicity of themes, issues, and concerns embedded in the songs of these artists.

Nelson “Dedos” Garcia

Canadian (b. 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia)

A Night in the Yard, 2012
digital ink

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

Nelson “Dedos” Garcia is a graffiti writer, bboy (also known as a break dancer), and member of the Juno Award winning group Rascalz. In A Night in the Yard, he references the iconic skeletons from Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations to create a portrait of a graffiti writer in a train yard at night. By taking inspiration from his Latin heritage and his wife’s Xochitl Mexican roots, Dedos illustrates the fluid, flexible, and inclusive nature of hip-hop culture.

A member of the pioneering graffiti muralist AA crew, Dedos has also worked with many Canadian recording artists to create visuals for their albums and singles. In his covers, he uses collage, caricature, and tagging to add visual dimensions to the music of well-known artists like k-os, The Northern Touch All-Stars, and K’Naan. Building on this extensive graffiti background, Dedos brings to these album covers a complex visual rendering of a multiplicity of themes, issues, and concerns embedded in the songs of these artists.

Nelson “Dedos” Garcia

Canadian (b. 1974, Vancouver, British Columbia)

Record cover for Northern Touch, 2018

Nelson “Dedos” Garcia is a graffiti writer, bboy (also known as a break dancer), and member of the Juno Award winning group Rascalz. In A Night in the Yard, he references the iconic skeletons from Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations to create a portrait of a graffiti writer in a train yard at night. By taking inspiration from his Latin heritage and his wife’s Xochitl Mexican roots, Dedos illustrates the fluid, flexible, and inclusive nature of hip-hop culture.

A member of the pioneering graffiti muralist AA crew, Dedos has also worked with many Canadian recording artists to create visuals for their albums and singles. In his covers, he uses collage, caricature, and tagging to add visual dimensions to the music of well-known artists like k-os, The Northern Touch All-Stars, and K’Naan. Building on this extensive graffiti background, Dedos brings to these album covers a complex visual rendering of a multiplicity of themes, issues, and concerns embedded in the songs of these artists.

Eklipz

Canadian (b. 1975, Toronto, Ontario)

Coltan Kills, 2015
aerosol paint, marker on vinyl

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

Eklipz has played a central role in the development of hip-hop culture in Hamilton, Ontario, where he is the founder of the Concrete Canvas Art Festival, a former radio show host on the program Live N Direct, and a multidisciplinary artist. In Coltan Kills, Eklipz remixes an advertisement by bombing the original image to draw attention to the phone industry’s reliance on extractive minerals from conflict zones that rely on child soldiers.

With Take the Train, Eklipz drops his tag onto miniature toy trains. This is a playful nod to how graffiti artists tagged actual trains in the early days of hip-hop culture—something many artists continue to do today.

Eklipz

Canadian (b. 1975, Toronto, Ontario)

Take the Train, 2015
Spray paint and acrylic on plastic-base train

Photo : Brandon Clarida Images Services

Eklipz has played a central role in the development of hip-hop culture in Hamilton, Ontario, where he is the founder of the Concrete Canvas Art Festival, a former radio show host on the program Live N Direct, and a multidisciplinary artist. In Coltan Kills, Eklipz remixes an advertisement by bombing the original image to draw attention to the phone industry’s reliance on extractive minerals from conflict zones that rely on child soldiers.

With Take the Train, Eklipz drops his tag onto miniature toy trains. This is a playful nod to how graffiti artists tagged actual trains in the early days of hip-hop culture—something many artists continue to do today.