A 1975 wheel and a 1999 photograph of a rider at a San Diego park sit inside the material for "Skate Craft," an exhibition at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park. The show's premise is that skateboarding belongs with things people made by hand.
TransWorld SKATEboarding reported that the show is opening in November. The Mingei International Museum describes the arc as running "from the early days of making decks in garages and building ramps from found lumber to the handcrafted works of art seen today."
Design That Came From the Riders
The museum is particular about who moved the equipment forward. The progression of skateboard design, safety gear and skate shoes, it says, ran alongside the inventive machines that made them possible, driven by skaters taking it upon themselves to push boundaries.
The exhibition text dates a Road Rider No. 6 wheel to 1975, with Tony Roderick as creator and NHS Inc. as manufacturer. A manufactured wheel inside a homemade story is less a contradiction than a next step in that progression. A wheel is an unglamorous piece of evidence. It is also the part that decides whether a garage deck actually rolls.
The museum follows the boards after the riding, too. Around the world, it says, artists have turned old skateboards into jewelry and furniture. A spent deck becomes raw stock again.
Joe Pino and the Park Under the Bridge
The exhibition page identifies Joe Pino as the skater pictured at Washington Street Skate Park in 1999. TransWorld SKATEboarding describes him as one of the DIY founders and builders of the Washington Street Skatepark when it first opened that year.
San Diego Skateboarding puts the park under the Pacific Highway bridge and says local skaters hand-built it starting in 1999. The gallery record and the bridge spot are separated by the years since that photograph, not by the method. Riders made the terrain.
Guest Curators and a Theater Slideshow
Mayo Mendoza and Guusje Sanders are listed as guest curators on the museum's exhibition page. Photographer Grant Brittain, speaking to TransWorld, was more specific about his own piece of it: "I will have a few items in the exhibit and will be giving a Slideshow in the theater."
Those items and that slideshow are attached to the November opening TransWorld reported. The park in Pino's photograph does not need a theater. Under the Pacific Highway bridge, Washington Street Skatepark remains, on San Diego Skateboarding's account, a place volunteers still maintain.
