15 Artists Supreme Introduced to Hypebeasts

Supreme New York was one of the pioneers in mixing skate and street culture with highbrow predilections. What's kept it authentic is that Supreme's relationship with art stems from founder James Jebbia's eclectic interests, and a like-minded braintrust and circle of friends who are genuinely into cool shit. While its collaborations with blue-chip artists like Christopher Wool, Damien Hirst, and Jeff Koons are most prominent on skate decks, Supreme didn't start making them until 1997. That series is commissioned by MoMA PS1's Senior Curatorial Advisor Nevile Wakefield, a friend of Supreme.

As strange as Supreme's relationship with the art world may seem, it all stems from a place of appreciation and iconoclasm. Who says young skate punks can't be into influential art movements? Who says relevant artists need to only show their work at high-profile galleries and museums to be truly validated? The New York label's first artist collaboration dates back to 1994 with Ramellzee, who took his talents to Supreme's apparel and store space.

Supreme's reappropriation is both progressive and subversive. Just today, the brand dropped a series of skate decks with Mark Flood and a hoodie emblazoned with Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (that instantly sold out). Granted, while many of its young consumers may not know who an artist is upon buying the Supreme product, there's undoubtedly a mutual benefit—they get to actually learn something. By putting art on some of its most coveted products, Supreme makes the work palatable to a new generation of discerning consumers. Here are 15 Artists Supreme Introduced to Hypebeasts.

RELATED: A History of Supreme's Artist Collaborations

Year: 1994

As a New York based brand, Supreme has done a better job than most recognizing artists from their hometown. Rammellzee, or RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, was just one of the most notable—and prolific. He painted with Dondi, released some of the earliest hip-hop, and twisted language and letters into an art form via his work ICONIC TREATISE GOTHIC FUTURISM. His costumes may have led to the likes of GWAR (and stand as his most well-known contribution), but he was so much more than a man in a mask.

Year: 1994 - 2009

Donald Joseph White was born in East New York, Brooklyn, started tagging in the mid-'70s, and officially became DONDI in 1979 when he painted the name across the roof of his building. As such, he influenced an entire generation of would-be graf writers, essentially validating it as an art form in the process. More than anyone before or after, DONDI was THE graffiti artist, and while he died young (in 1998), he lived long enough to see his art form mature to what it is today.

Year: 1994

There would still be a Supreme without Barbara Kruger, but safe to say it would look a lot different. Supreme's now-iconic box logo is derived directly from Kruger's readily identifiable white-on-red work which she pioneered in the late '70s. The one-time magazine designer turned work she did at Conde Nast on its ear, presenting declarative phrases in bold, clear print, often over or alongside equally stark images. As for what the now 69-year-old artist thinks of Supreme's (and other brand's) appropriation of her style, well, you asked.

Year: 2004

REAS has come a long way from tagging subway trains as a kid. His work ranges from music (the Beastie Boys' Brooklyn Dust Elephant logo), media (The Source magazine logo), to even puppets (Comedy Central's Crank Yankers). One of the progenitors of modern street art, he got together with equally influential contemporaries like Barry McGee and Steve Powers to create Street Market at New York City's Deitch Projects in 2001. Three years later, REAS was part of the traveling Beautiful Losers exhibition, which set the precedent for the DIY attitude and evolved graffiti aesthetic that many consider "street art" today. That same year, he also dsigned a series of shirts for Supreme depicting cartoonish women with big butts.

Year: 2005 - present

English designer Peter Saville is best known for the work he did for Factory Records, which means primarily Joy Division and New Order. Later he would go on to design covers for Duran Duran and Peter Gabriel, among others, and to do consultancy work for companies ranging from Selfridges to Christian Dior. But it was Saville's early work with Factory that Supreme chose to highlight—which, outside of context, wasn't even really Saville's work, per se. He co-opted imagery himself, from an image of radio waves from a pulsar for Joy Division to a Fantin-Latour "Roses" for New Order. Given an entirely new context again by Supreme, Saville's work found a new audience with some who no doubt weren't even familiar with the record jackets, let alone Saville's original source material.

Year: 2006

If you've seen Wild Style, then you're already familiar with Charlie Ahearn's work. Moving to New York in the 1970s, Ahearn and his twin brother John were part of the art group CoLab, where he honed his camera skills shooting 16 mm art films. While shooting in the Lower East Side, he came across work from Lee Quinones and local breakdancers, exposing him to hip-hop culture. In 1980, CoLab hosted The Times Square Show in an erotic massage parlor, which ingratiated artists like Kenny Scharf, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat into the art world proper.

Year: 2008

Ralph Bakshi was to animation what R. Crumb was to comics. 1972's "Fritz the Cat" (based on a Crumb comic), his first feature film, was the first animated film to receive an X rating from the MPAA. Unsurprisingly, it was an enormous success. This led to more mainstream works including a "Lord of the Rings" adaptation in 1978, and the live/animated feature "Cool World" in 1992. Born in Palestine, Bakshi was raised in New York City—which he mined for the settings of "Fritz the Cat," converting photographs via Rapidograph into animation cels.

Year: 2007 - present

Mark Gonzales is known as a skateboarder first, but his impact as an artist has been just as notable. He did his own graphics starting back when he skated for Vision in the '80s, then Blind in the '90s, and eventually for his own company, Krooked, which he started in 2002. He is widely recognized as the most influential street skater ever—in 2011 Transworld went so far as to dub him the most influential skateboarder ever, period—and even at 45 he still drops the occasional video part. His affiliation with Supreme has been long and prolific, and continues today. GONS' imagery is utilized on many pieces (sometimes with his intentional mispelling of the name: "SUPREAM"), and even made an appearance in "cherry," Supreme's recently released skate video.

Year: 2008

Marilyn Minter's photographs and photorealistic paintings zoom tightly into glamorous images, turning them into grotesques. After establishing her style in the mid '80s, the NYC-based artist began working with appropriated images from porn and high fashion starting in the late '80s. The images Supreme chose for their series of three decks—a string of pearls dangling from a lipsticked mouth, a high-heeled foot splashing a dirty puddle, and a sharp greenish-blue eye framed by blurred wet lashes—come from the same period of 2005-06. The high-heeled shot is from a series that went up on Chelsea billboards for a month, meaning her work had already found the streets.

Year: 2009 - present

Long before the photographer courted controversy with fashion models and regularly shot magazine covers, he was snapping photos of California punks. Terry Richardson and Supreme mesh well together because of his lo-fi approach (often shooting with point-and-shoot 35 mm cameras like a Yashica T4 Super) and sexually charged material. One of his earlier works was a racy campaign for British designer Katherine Hamnett in 1995. Richardson was also behind Supreme's 2001 and 2003 calendars that took the pin-up girl to a more visceral level.

Year: 2010

Long before he was Kanye West's Twitter avi (part of his work for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy), George Condo was a fixture in the East Village art scene. Condo described his style as Artificial Realism, "the realistic representation of that which is artificial," characterized by the fusion of Europe's Old Master's with American Pop influence. One of the contemporararies of other influential NY artists like Basquiat and Keith Haring, Condo's dark work is known for distorting human faces into a mixture of caricature and puppet facade. He also handpainted Kim Kardashian's Hermes Birkin Bag that West gave to her in 2013.

Year: 2010 - present

Nate Lowman's work often critiques celebrity, materialism, and gun culture—which is why he's the man responsible for the oversized bullet holes in Supreme's walls, but it's something he'd already done for galleries. Lowman may have the DGAF-attitude and lower Manhattan loft characteristic of NY cool guys, and he's even BFFs with Kids star and art gallery owner Leo Fitzpatrick, but he's more than just a handsome face. Although, he did model for Supreme's Fall/Winter 2010 lookbook. Lowman's art evolved beyond bumper sticker-inspired paintings and portraiture to a series of works that questioned the meaning of the smiley-face. Given the rise of emoji culture, Lowman's early commentary on the deceptive nature of emoticons signifies a cultural critic with his eyes ahead of the curve.

Year: 2011

Robert Longo was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island, and after college in Texas moved to New York City, completing the trifecta. His stark drawings start as traced photographs, and removal of their backgrounds make them more sculpture like, which is where his academic background lies. From enormous guns to atomic explosions to blackened American flags to his "Men in the City" series, his work has long centered on powerful imagery made even more powerful through its intentional lack of context. Later he went on to direct several music videos as well as a full-length feature film (Johnny Mnemonic), but Supreme chose to utilize his earlier, simpler work.

Year: 2012

An Austrian artist who died in 1918, Gustav Klimt was about as familiar with skateboarding as most skaters are familiar with him. But even those who don't know Klimt's name probably recognize his best-known piece, "The Kiss," a piece done in oil paints and gold leaf when he was in his mid-40s. He'd only live another decade, dying at the age of 55, but his art would live on—in galleries as well as on the aptly named "Vienna" t-shirt.

Year: 2012

London-born Iakovos "Jake" Chapman and Konstantinos "Dinos" Chapman started collaborating on art inb 1991, often using plastic models or fiberglass mannequins. Their oeuvre has always skewed towards violence and unnerving imagery, like their piece The Disasters of War, a Goya-esque work made of plastic models depicting various manner of torture. Their Supreme collaboration drew inspiration from brothers' grotesque child mannequins. In 2008 they reinterpreted a series of landscape paintings by Adolf Hitler at the White Cube gallery.