Tai is a full-time traveling visual artist whose ballpoint pen work pulls from a lifetime spent inside hip-hop, punk, skateboarding, and pop culture. For over twenty years, he and his wife Adrienne have run ArtByTai together on the festival circuit, building a body of work he describes as a long-running narrative, dense with the icons, contradictions, and inside jokes of the worlds that raised him. Every piece is drawn entirely by hand in pen, no shortcuts, no stencils, just thousands of hours of obsessive line work translating memory and culture into something you can hang on a wall.
Beyond the booth, Tai co-hosts the DOD45 Show podcast with Adrienne and runs DOD45 as an independent underground hip-hop label and curation project, recently co-releasing the Resistance 45 maxi-single with Strange Famous Records. He holds a Matai chief title in Samoa and is preparing to receive the pe’a this August, the next chapter in a story he’s been telling on paper for two decades. Stop by the booth, flip through the work, and ask him anything. He’s almost always down to talk.