Inga Guzyte’s Art of Recycled Skateboards Takes Off
The Anapamu Street facade of Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery, looks friendly with a dash of imposing. As the city’s premier gallery, its status complements the Santa Barbara Museum of Art across the street. Established artists such as Hank Pitcher, Nicole Strasburg, John Nava, and Angela Perko have been with the gallery for several decades. Individual works on display are priced as high as five or six figures. Its archival holdings stretch into the 19th century, and the gallery has published handsome scholarly monographs on master artists including Ray Strong. Leon Dabo, and Lockwood de Forest. Sullivan Goss looks like a pillar of the art establishment because it is one.
This accumulated prestige makes the story of the gallery’s breakout star of the moment that much more interesting. Inga Guzyte, a 37-year-old immigrant from Lithuania by way of Germany, just sold out her solo show Young Sparrows. According to the gallery’s owner, Nathan Vonk, this maintains Guzyte’s perfect record of selling every work she’s ever shown at Sullivan Goss.
To say Guzyte’s work is distinctive is an understatement. Even in an era of relentless innovation and stunt-like conceits in the visual arts, Guzyte’s dynamic and colorful portraits stand out. Going by visitor responses to the work’s impact, it practically jumps off the wall. According to Vonk, “It’s not all the time when somebody comes in and says, ‘That’s the most exciting work I’ve seen by anybody in a long time,’ and that repeatedly happens whenever we show Inga’s work.”
Take, for example, “Lifting Spirits,” a vibrant portrait of Amanda Gorman, the young poet who shot to stardom after appearing at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Guzyte’s image centers Gorman’s face amid an ecstatic circle of bright-yellow daffodils and accents the central composition with a pair of red birds pendant on the top right and left. The hue of the flowers recalls the bright-yellow coat Gorman wore to the inauguration, and the faint blue tint that shades her face draws from the podium’s backdrop. The birds reconstitute the red flash of her headgear. The work’s colors are unquestionably an essential element in the overall impact of “Lifting Spirits.” As Guzyte explains, “I chose daffodils because of their symbolic meaning: hope, resilience, and creativity.”
And it’s made 100 percent from broken skateboard decks.
What It’s All About
Young Sparrows is Guzyte’s second solo show at Sullivan Goss. The first, #RebelWomen, in 2019, consisted of similar portraits focusing on another distinguished group of feminist icons. Looking closely at any one of these works reveals an intricate construction process based on an unlikely palette.
Each work begins with stacks of discarded skateboard decks that the artist collects in her studio off Milpas Street. Guzyte sorts the decks by color, then painstakingly saws them into individual pieces that vary in width from several inches to less than a centimeter. Employing aspects of the woodworking technique known as marquetry, she pieces together the colored segments, then varnishes them for display as wall-mounted sculptural reliefs. Rather than applying new pigment to realize her vision, Guzyte relies solely on the color schemes already present in the decks. She obtains used decks through friendly skate shops and individual skaters who know and admire her work.
It takes her long hours at the scroll saw, surrounded by stacks of color-coded decks, to create these one-of-a-kind handcrafted objects. Like a kind of freeform jigsaw puzzle, each design requires so much concentration that Guzyte only works on one at a time. The series procedure standard among painters, in which multiple canvases are going at once, would overwhelm the equipment and the artist.
Great art gets more interesting the more you know about it, and that’s abundantly true in this case. Guzyte’s work reflects her journey, and her story offers a handy lesson in what makes someone successful in contemporary art. To trace one way that might be true, here’s a brief list of qualities that characterize breakthrough efforts in this wide-open yet highly competitive field of endeavor.
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