Mark Gonzales, also known as "GONZ", is an American professional skateboarder and artist. He is known as a pioneer of modern street skateboarding and was named the "Most Influential Skateboarder of All Time" by Transworld Skateboarding magazine. Sem Rubio cut his teeth as an artist by becoming one of the world’s foremost skateboard photographers. He is based in Blanes, Catalunya. Hiroshi Fujiwara is a Japanese musician, producer, and designer. Tom Sachs is an American contemporary artist. Gus Van Sant is an award-winning American filmmaker.
Skateboard Icon
Gonzales entered the skateboarding scene at the age of thirteen in South Gate, California, U.S. At the age of fifteen, as Tommy Guerrero and Natas Kaupas were developing their own styles of progressive street skating around the same time, Gonzales adopted a more modern, innovative approach to skateboarding in a street context (subsequently dubbed "street skateboarding"). He was featured on the cover of Thrasher magazine’s November 1984 issue riding a board from the Alva company, his board sponsor at the time, while performing a trick known as a "Beanplant".
In the summer of 1986 Gonzales performed an ollie from one wall down to another platform at The Embarcadero in San Francisco, U.S. and the obstacle had been known as the "Gonz Gap" since his completion of the trick, which also helped to popularize The Embarcadero as a location for skateboarding. Later that year, Gonzales - along with fellow progressive street skater Natas Kaupas - was the first person to skate handrails. Gonzales was also the first person to ollie the Wallenberg Set, a four-block, nineteen feet-long, four feet-tall gap in San Francisco, California.
In reference to the early era of street skating, professional skateboarder Mike Vallely stated in a 2007 interview: "At the time, the best street skaters in the world were Mark Gonzales, Jesse Martinez, Tommy Guerrero, who all three were Mexican kids, and Natas Kaupas, who was a Lithuanian dude that lived at the beach in Santa Monica." In an interview for the Adidas website, Gonzales explained in reply to a question about his influence with the Blind company, "I wanted to work with my big brother doing construction—at the time I felt old, but had a young chick."
In 2006 Gonzales was awarded the Legend Award by Transworld Skateboarding, and the magazine selected him as the most influential skateboarder of all time (followed by Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen) in December 2011.
An arrangement of pieces by Skateboard Icon & Artist Gonz
Artist or Skater? Both!
London-based art curator Emma Reeves has explained in an introduction that she wrote for Interview magazine: "He makes art all the time, and he has been making art in some form or another for almost as long as he has been skateboarding. But it’s rare to see an actual show of the work". An interview that Reeves completed with Gonzales is also published in Interview and he reveals that he likes creating "zines" the most, as "it is the most free thing to do". In 2008, Drag City released a book called The Collected Fanzines that consists of reproductions of old zines that he created together with director Harmony Korine.
Gonzales was featured in the music video for the song "West Coast" by Jason Schwartzman’s band, Coconut Records. The music video featured a sequence that was originally filmed in 1998 at a German museum, but was edited for the purpose of the music video with Gonzales' permission. Gonzales also directed and appears in the Coconut Records music video "Any Fun", alongside actress Chloë Sevigny and skateboarder Alex Olson.
Gonzales is also a poet and author, and his published body of work includes Social Problems, High Tech Poetry, Broken Dreams, and Broken Poems. Gonzales has revealed that he is constantly writing poetry.
In 2011, Gonzales designed and painted the London Flagship Supreme Store. Gonzales would send letters to the New York store entitled “Supream” (purposeful misspelling) during the early years of the brand. This led to many collaborations with Gonzales and Supreme, with the latest being in the Spring/Summer '23 collection. Gonzales has designed sculptures and paintings for Supreme’s retail locations in New York (Manhattan), San Francisco, London, Paris, Tokyo (Shibuya), Nagoya, and Osaka.
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