Skateboarding is Art

SMFA has influenced and guided the life trajectory of Jahmal Williams, BFA ‘02, for decades, from enrolling as a first-generation college student to chance meet-ups with professors while skating around Boston to finding studio space years later. 

Williams, Founder and Creative Director of Hopps Skateboards, has been a professional skateboarder for more than 20 years. His artistic practice grew in parallel with his career as a pro skater, and for a long time, he kept them completely separate from one another. 

As a teenager growing up in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Williams leaned into drawing. All the while, he was establishing himself within the local Boston skating scene.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but skateboarding became a passport for me. It gave me a purpose to travel to all these different neighborhoods – a transition bank in Brookline, a drained swimming pool in Cambridge – and meet skaters there. Next thing you know, we’re competing in competitions out of state, and then within a few years, on the international circuit,” Williams said.

Choosing a path

With high school graduation approaching, Williams was faced with what would become a familiar challenge: should he choose skating or art? He was accepted to SMFA and began his first semester in 1994. While pursuing professional skating, he found it challenging to balance those demands with college coursework, ultimately stepping away before later returning to his studies through a more circuitous path.

For the next several years, Williams focused solely on skating. He moved from the amateur tour to the professional circuit, riding for (now defunct) T.V. Skateboards. One day while riding at Massachusetts Avenue and Boylston St., he recognized a familiar face: Professor of the Practice Robert Baart, whom he had taken an oil painting class with during his semester at SMFA.

“He said, ‘Do you remember me? I was your painting teacher. You left a painting in my studio, and you should come get it.’ I never did. Then, I’d run into him again months later, and he’d ask how I was and remind me that he still had that painting,” Williams remembers. 

That conversation stuck with him and made him think. A few years before, after encouragement from his mentor and Skateboard Hall of Famer Ed Templeton, an artist and photographer himself, Williams painted his very first pro model board graphic. That allowed Williams to combine his passions for the first time, and as he puts it, “I was getting props for my art again.”

When canvas meets concrete

He knew what he had to do. In 1998, Williams re-enrolled at SMFA. He threw himself into the "incredible amount of freedom the school provided to explore any medium.” At his advisor Stanley Pickney’s advice, he took a sculpting class and tried ceramics, jewelry making, and graphic design. He spent Saturday mornings in the studio with instructors Charlotte Andry Gibbs and Barney Rubenstein, discussing the works of Paul Cézanne and others. 

He also took Baart’s oil painting class again. During one of the first sessions, Baart walked out of his studio with his hands full, a smile on his face. “Remember this?” he asked, showing Williams his forgotten painting from more than a decade ago. The fact that Baart had held onto his painting for all those years was a physical representation of how SMFA and its support remained in Williams' life, even when he least expected it. 

By his last year at SMFA, Williams’ demanding skating travel schedule had impacted his ability to produce a body of work significant enough for his portfolio review. During a conversation with Professors of the Practice Chantal Zakari and Milton Derr (1932 - 2021), he came clean about his professional skating career. “I had always kept my art and my skating separate. Once I told Chantal and Milton, they encouraged me to create work that was skateboarding-related, and that’s when I began to look at skating as an art form, too,” he said. 

It was a breakthrough moment. Once Williams broke down the decades-long wall he’d built, his creativity flowed innately between the two. His second-chance review board, featuring abstract paintings and sculptures inspired by skateboarding and jazz music, was so well received that he not only was back on track, but also offered additional credit for the dense volume of work he produced. 

A new game plan

After graduation, Williams returned to skating full-time. On the side, he worked at an Adidas store in Miami, Florida, and began experimenting with a new medium: shoes. When the customized paintings he added to sneaker designs took off and caught the attention of artists like Missy Elliott and pro athlete Kevin Garnett, Williams felt the tug of practice, this time pulling him to New York. Inspired by his mentors Templeton and Mike Vallely, Williams set out to launch his own skating brand; one that fused art and skating in a creative, sustainable way.

Again, SMFA was the first thing that came to mind. “I went back to my notes from SMFA about implementing a game plan and a strategy at the start of a project. I started sketching ideas for a logo and a name, getting the blueprint,” he said.

In 2007, Hopps Skateboards was born from that blueprint, but more directly, from Williams’ dream to “create a creative lifestyle that can both function and be supportive.” As the Founder and Creative Director, Williams creates and oversees the designs for boards, wheels, and merchandise for four collection drops per year. As the company has grown, he’s outsourced day-to-day management, allowing him to spend more time on the design side of things.

He recently celebrated his 50th birthday with a two-person show in Kingston, New York, and a mural in Williamsburg, New York, sponsored by Converse–which miraculously “no one tagged or did any graffiti on for almost a year,” he laughed.

As he continues to build a stronger studio practice using fellow SMFA alum Thyra Heder’s space in Brooklyn Navy Yard, and exhibit his work, a takeaway from his time at SMFA keeps Williams centered: “The key thing I learned was to allow for my skateboarding to energize my artistic endeavors, and allow my artistic endeavors to come back and inform my skateboarding habit and business.”

Image: Jahmal Williams skateboards along the Pilgrim Surf Shop "Dreamer Mural". Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY, 2021. Photo by Pep Kim.