Todd James (born 1969) is a contemporary artist from New York City. Self-taught, he started tagging the New York City Subway system under the name REAS when he was very young. James designed the Beastie Boys' Brooklyn Dust Elephant logo (1987) The Source (Magazine) logo as well as Mobb Deep, Red Man, Eminem, Kid Rock. Art from his coloring book/zine Attitude Dancer was used as a cover for Iggy Pop's Beat em up album. Todd Was the puppet designer for Crank Yankers on Comedy Central produced by Jimmy Kimmel and Jack Hole productions.

He created, with Barry McGee and Steve Powers, Street Market at New York City's Deitch Projects. This exhibition was selected for the 2001 Venice Biennale. In 2004, he also participated in the group exhibition Beautiful Losers which travelled to several museums in the US. The Street Market installation was re -built and expanded for the L.A. MOCA "Art in the Streets" in 2011.

His works have been shown at numerous museums and galleries worldwide, like the Tate Liverpool, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts or the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia.

His distinctive cartoon-style paintings are very ironic. Todd's paintings reflected a variety of influences, including the pop culture and American expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

Source:
wikipedia.org

Regarded by many as the quintessential American street artist, Todd James began his career painting in the subway system of New York under the name REAS.

James has since achieved enormous commercial success as a designer and illustrator, working extensively with hip-hop musicians such as Pharrell Williams, Eminem, Iggy Pop, and the Beastie Boys. James’ images are often gleefully crude, delighting in the raunchy and the violent, resulting in arresting works which are utterly unapologetic. The sprawling composition of flat lines and blocks of colour recall the later works of Henri Matisse, while James’ vivid palette and array of pop-culture references evoke the surrealism of Peter Saul. Through the mixture of new and old, graffiti and abstract, James proffers a landscape of infinite interpretative possibilities to be explored and discovered.

Indeed, James’ career has seamlessly bridged the gap between the worlds of graffiti, commercial art, and fine art. The explosion of graphics, brimming with images taken from news and media, synthesises fantasy, sex, and comics, resulting in an absurd intermingling of slapstick cartoons - a truly American homage.

Though James maintains that his work is not meant to be critical, recurrent motifs such as nude females, tanks, and anthropomorphic fighter planes, allude to the darker underbelly of contemporary society.

The current work exhibited at Hong Kong, AISHONANZUKA, Afternoon Delight, 12 September - 11 October 2014 Illustrating the character “Tit Wizard”, a motif reappearing throughout the artist's oeuvre, the current work, Chicken Fingers, was featured in James’ 2014 solo exhibition at AISHONANZUKA in Hong Kong. The voluptuous set of breasts resting under an erect wizard hat, coupled with a set of goofy eyes which gaze questioningly at the viewer, suggest some magical rearranging of the female anatomy for public consumption. The assortment of circles and triangles reduces the figure into quasi-abstraction. Yet, seemingly in defiance, the spindly chicken leg raises a middle finger, a clear marker of James’ dark humour.

James is the co-creator of Street Market, a major work of the post-graffiti movement that debuted at the Philadelphia ICA in 1999 and was expanded at Deitch Projects in New York in 2000. A re-creation of this work was the central installation of the LA MOCA’s record-breaking Art in the Streets exhibition a decade later. Street Market by Barry McGee, Steve Powers and Todd James, exhibited at Art in the Streets, MOCA Los Angeles, 2011 Most recently, Todd James has had solo exhibitions at Javier Lopez & Fer Frances Gallery, Madrid in 2020, and another at Ross + Kramer Gallery, New York, March 2021.

James’ paintings and installations have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including both the 2001 and 2015 Venice Biennale. In addition, he has been exhibited at the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, USA; The Institute of Contemporary Arts, Philadelphia, PA, USA; The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, USA; and Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, USA. His work is held in a number of important private and public collections including the MIMA MUSEUM Brussels, Belgium.

James currently lives and works in New York, and is represented by AISHONANZUKA.