About me:
.My name is Pootie, born December 31st. I’ve spent my entire life in NYC, as a native New Yorker, I’ve grown up surrounded and mesmerized by the arts. As a child, I spent time visiting the Met and MoMA alongside countless other museums that the city has to offer. In 2008, I visited the Brooklyn Museum’s Exhibit © MURAKAMI, where I became completely engulfed by art. This exhibit galvanized my entire outlook on art. It was from that exact moment, I felt I needed to dedicate my life to visual expression through different mediums. I wanted to learn everything, but I started creatively expressing myself through fashion, painting, sculpting, printmaking, and computer graphics/web design. This led me to the Fashion Institute of Technology, where I enrolled in screen printing classes. That same summer, I became a commissioned Youth Artist, painting numerous murals with the Groundswell Community Mural Project. The program utilized art as a vehicle for social change. Keeping with these ideas, I expanded on my range of mediums to include: painting, sculpting, printmaking, 3D design, and animation. In my art, I like to reference other artists, memes, and pop culture. Hence the name, “Bootlegged Art”.
Artist Statement:
Bootlegged Art is a term I constructed after hearing the Picasso quote “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” As all humans do, we consume everything we see, physically or mentally. In my own life many works of art have been recycled from something I’ve seen before. Inspiration, as we call it, the term used to explain how something can derive directly from another but not be the same. Great artists will absorb all the work they have been exposed to, and simulate it in their own way. Whether that work of art is a painting in a museum, an album cover, or even an Ad you see on the subway. As humans we process this imagery, and emulate work to reproduce it in our own style. Art to me has been an instrument to spread feeling and awareness, whether its perceived at the moment of encounter, or years later. An artist’s work should always grab your attention and give you a feeling that has connected you to something. Much like a thief, an artist will take possession of something, knowing it’s not theirs and transform it, through their own creative process which in turn, then belongs to them. In this day and age, we’ve all been exposed to so much, that we can only Bootleg Art.
Bootlegged ART © 2023