Danny Minnick
Paint Like You Skate — Danny Minnick for Wynwood Walls and THE SKATEROOM
Danny Minnick spent about twenty years riding skateboards before he started painting on them. This November, he is artist in residence at Wynwood Walls in Miami, and he is arriving with a collection made with THE SKATEROOM: original paintings on decks, limited edition decks, and a giclée triptych.
From skateboarding to art
Danny Minnick turned pro in his early teens and skated professionally for two decades, until an Achilles tendon injury ended that career. Painting filled the gap. In 2011, his friend and fellow pro Chad Muska showed him how to stretch and build his own canvases, and a first Los Angeles solo show, Break the Walls, followed. Since then his work has been shown from London to Singapore, and in 2022 he curated Turning Tricks with our dear collaborator Michèle Lamy at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Los Angeles, a show that reimagined some of Southern California's best-known skate spots.
He never really left skateboarding. He still films and directs skate videos, and skating remains his main subject.
Paint like you skate
Minnick's paintings are loud in the best sense: thick layers of oil and spray paint, loose drawn figures, splatter, scratches and overpainting. Some of his large works are cut from sections of his own studio floor or wall, so the surface already carries the marks of everything that happened on it. Critics file him under Neo-Expressionism.
That makes the skateboard an obvious canvas. THE SKATEROOM has used the deck as a medium for artists since the beginning. This time, the artist is someone who has snapped more of them than most of us will ever own.
November at Wynwood Walls
Wynwood Walls opened in 2009 as an open-air museum for street art and graffiti, in what was then a warehouse district of Miami. Minnick's work has been shown there before. This November, he returns for Wynwood Wall’s first-ever Artist Residency Program, and the original painted decks will be sold on site.
