Join Aperture and Arcana: Books on the Arts for a book signing with Ed Templeton to celebrate his newly released monograph Wires Crossed (Aperture, 2023).

Part memoir, part document of the DIY, punk-infused subculture of skateboarding as it came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s, Ed Templeton’s Wires Crossed pulses with the raw, combustive energy of Templeton’s image-making from the last twenty-plus years. Illustrated by photographs, collages, texts, maps, and other ephemera from Templeton’s journals, Wires Crossed offers an insider’s look at a subculture in the making and reflects the unique aesthetic stamp that sprang from the skate world he helped create. Templeton occupies the rare position of having been a professional skateboarder, a two-time World Skateboarding champion, as well as a photographer and artist working within the skateboard community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond.

This event is presented in partnership with Arcana: Books on the Arts.

Ed Templeton (born in Los Angeles, 1972) is a star skateboarder, entrepreneur, painter, and street photographer. He has published over twenty books of his photographs, not including the volumes of zines he has self-produced over the years. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including at Alleged Gallery, New York; Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles; Modern Art, London; and Aki-X Gallery, Tokyo, and in solo museum exhibitions at Museum Het Domein, Netherlands, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He is considered part of the Beautiful Losers, a group of artists who, in the 1990s, defined the high-brow/low-brow mix of graffiti, skate culture, and art.

Image: Ed Templeton, Mike Maldonado, Iowa, 1998; from Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed (Aperture, 2023). © 2023 Ed Templeton


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