This coming Friday, adidas Skateboarding will host an adidas Showcase in our home city of San Francisco! Setting up with our friends over at First Amendment Gallery, they're bringing a handful of talented artists from the skateboarding world to exhibit their work. The show's roster includes a wide array of painters, photographers, zine-makers, and more, including ones we know and ones we're just getting to know. Read up on them below:

Michelle Williams

Born in Colorado, raised in Utah and Northern California, Michelle produces woodblock & linoleum relief prints, photographs, screen prints, and hand-made books exploring connections between humans, animals, and the land we occupy. She is a founding member of the San Francisco Poster Syndicate and is currently working as a Production Artist for Deluxe Distribution in San Francisco, CA.

Ken Davis

Everything we encounter has power to either improve or debase its environment. This is what draws me to utilizing words as a major icon to communicate in my work. Through working as a professional sign painter for over a decade, words have been my co workers, my assistants in completing the tasks requested of me. Some more pleasant than others. Whether spoken, written, read, or otherwise communicated, words carry power. They can nurture communication and bring forth positive change, or shut down all communication and build walls between groups. Through hand painting words, it enables one to truly pay attention to every effect letters and words have.

It is my belief that we live in a series of illusions imposed upon us by ourselves and acceptance of the ideas of others. Most of what we’re told is essential to a fulfilling life, is not. In fact, the pursuit of such things depletes us of the power we have to be our best selves in our own lives and communities. If we all choose to take the steps to deconstruct our lives to a pace that we are more suited, free of predatory influence, we are more present in our own lives and therefore are more effective individuals. I work in a craft that has no other option but to command one’s full presence during as a constant reminder that things of true significance take significant time. I intend in my artwork to convey the message to the viewer to slow down, and appreciate everything as it comes... to work on something you love and make it the best you can without fear or doubt as a master. We must refuse systems engineered to distract us from our selves, our families, and our communities. We have everything we need. Despite the dualities we live in, make this chance you have at life the best life you can.

James Ferrando

Growing up in San Francisco, skateboarding gave me an appreciation of the culture of life in the streets.

As I got older I felt the pressures of gentrification pushing out the life I was accustomed to. I picked up a camera to capture the inbetween moments of life that remind me the culture of San Francisco is still alive.

Daniel Valencia

Daniel Valencia is a self-taught photographer who practices traditional black and white techniques in a dark room. He was born in San Jose, CA and raised in Seven Trees, San Jose by his Mexican mother. Seven Trees was its own unincorporated city, surrounded by South San Jose, and was not recognized as a part of San Jose until it was annexed in 2009. Growing up with no designated police force, city officials, or governing authority in the area, Daniel chose a skateboard and a camera as his way of observing, documenting, and processing the mayhem around him.

He started seriously documenting his community, the street culture, and the children in his neighborhood in 2009 with his series Seven Trees. The series captured the attention of the arts community in San Jose and was exhibited in galleries such as De-Bug and Metro Newspaper’s Metro Gallery. In 2011 he received the Downtown Doors award, granting him the opportunity to display larger than life photos on the doors of multiple businesses and public spaces in San Jose’s downtown area. The Downtown Doors were also accompanied with a one-day show at the San Jose Museum of Art. During this time in San Jose, Daniel worked as an apprentice to Jai Tanju, the owner of Seeing Things Gallery. Here he learned the business of operating a gallery and realized his love of curating.

In 2014, Daniel moved to San Francisco to further cultivate his passion for photography. He worked as a darkroom technician at Rayko Photo Center for three years before they closed to the public in 2017. At Rayko he started exploring his current techniques of burning and physically manipulating photo negatives, as well as mural sized darkroom printing. He now works as an assistant curator at Book and Job Gallery and is the official photographer for the political printmaking collective the San Francisco Poster Syndicate; as well as a member of the Film Por Vida Print Exchange Program.

Alex Fatemi

"My work is directly inspired from nature, landscapes and the randomness of everyday life. From the architectural design of buildings to that of humans and all beings of this world, their impressions are a permanent influence on the way I see things and how I reflect those experiences on a surface. It is a representation of these outward and inward influences together. The colors, and lines I put on any surface creates compositions that are not only a reflection of vibrant experiences, but also a window for a reflection process of your own ideas as to what your inner and outward environment could be.”

Sean Silk

Sean Silk is a San Francisco based artist. His current works reflect the symbiotic relationship between time and change.

Lauren D’Amato

I received a BFA from The San Francisco Art Institute in 2016, and am currently living and working as an independent sign painter in San Francisco. I was born in Whittier, California to a household with a fading 1970s interior aesthetic that was home to a replica painter, a dancer, gold jewelers, and sign painters. This exposure has drawn me to disciplines such as furniture design, decorative arts, and lettering. My paintings are composed of graphic illustrations and typographic elements that complicate the distinction between the manufactured and the handmade mark. In my process of image making I strive to relate to a prior generation of blue-collar workers and folk artists to ensure that the visual languages I am inspired by do not become obsolete.

George Rocha

My artwork is a culmination of 35 years of skateboarding, 23 years of skatepark building and 10 years of working with recycled skateboards. I incorporate the skills and mastery of a variety of materials that I learned through building skateparks with the atypical and divergent thinking of a life long skateboarder.

Max Marttila

My work is a biographical and ethnographic study of the city I grew up in. Figures are composed into open minimalized fields of color and architecture, relating to issues of pride, aspirations, fashion, street trauma, police brutality, digitalism, and local folklore based in a rapidly shifting landscape. The majority of my subjects cast their gaze down in a contemplative, introspective manner, away from the viewer. This speaks further to a shared defensive mentality, hardened overtime by a distrust in local politicians and corrupted institutions as well as desensitization to a worsening homeless and mental health epidemic. These studies, social ties and sensibilities mirror my work practice outside of the studio, based in community muralism. This process thrives on stories and concepts that are manifested collaboratively and outside of myself, rooted deeply in multiple generations of San Francisco history. I’m inspired to create paintings that possess a similar acknowledgement of the world around me.

Julie Sarmiento

“This is a reminder to myself to take a break from life every so often and focus on the simple things that get me through, like skateboarding.”

- Jaime Owens, TransWorld Skateboarding Editor in Chief