“Visual art has gotten to a point where it’s almost being ignored by mass society, just because it’s so expensive,” says Felipe Lima, one of the eight Northwestern students who make up the art collective and T-shirt company Shurpa. “The T-shirt is a reinterpretation of a canvas for everybody.”
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About six months ago the Shurpa members were having one of those drunken conversations in which everything seems superimportant. They started talking about the hat Adrian Adkison was wearing, a knitted number with earflaps. Someone said it was a sherpa hat. “It struck me as a profound term,” says Adkison. “They’re masters of their mountain.” The group started arguing about how the word was spelled and pronounced: Did it have an e? Was an umlaut involved? Instead of consulting a dictionary, Dorothy Kronick pulled out some oil pastels and scrawled what would become their logo–SHURPA.
The Ts are manufactured by American Apparel, a Los Angeles company known for its high-quality shirts and its antisweatshop stance. The designs are inspired by the graffiti-informed graphics of west-coast skate and surf culture and the work of artists like local painter and designer Cody Hudson. A design by Josh Malmuth breaks down three hills into stylized domes, and Lima’s “Sunset Blvd.” is a yellow traffic sign with a sun setting over the water. “This isn’t where skateboarding took off,” says Lima–“it’s not sunny weather, it’s not new concrete–but I feel like it’s appropriate for us. . . . The ideology deals with ideas behind the whole pop art movement, like what is high art and what is just a snazzy image to put on the bottom of a skateboard deck?”
