Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed: The Culture of Skateboarding, 1995-2012

In his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, the Long Beach Museum of Art presents Ed Templeton: Wires Crossed, The Culture of Skateboarding, 1995 – 2012. Ed Templeton is a photographer, artist, and one of the most influential skateboarders of all time. During his many tours throughout America, Templeton (Garden Grove, California, 1972) recorded skate culture using his 50-mm camera. These snapshots show Templeton’s journey as a photographer and peers into the lives of amateur and professional skateboarders he traveled the globe with while skateboarding for video productions, competitions, and demonstrations.

Wires Crossed is part memoir, part documentation of the DIY, punk-infused skateboarding subculture as it came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s, and pulses with the raw, combustive energy of Templeton’s image-making from the last twenty-plus years. Through photography, collage, text, maps, and eclectic ephemera from Templeton’s archives, Wires Crossed offers an inside look at a significant facet of youth culture as it was born.

Templeton occupies the rare position of having been a professional skateboarder, two-time world skateboarding champion, and artist working within the skateboard community as it gained increasing cultural currency in the 1990s and beyond. This work, much of it previously unpublished and unseen, explores Templeton’s journey as an image maker, as well as the lives of professional skateboarders as they spent long hours crisscrossing the world on tour, reveling in their newfound status as a rock star–like figures and the eternal search for new terrain to skate.

This exhibition (and accompanying book) demonstrate Templeton’s ability to capture what this life is like on film from the inside out, shooting the triumphs and disasters equally, the blood and the pain, boredom, self-medication, lust, toxic masculinity, and all the transitory moments behind the scenes. He paints an honest and gritty portrait of what it was like to be a skateboarder in a time before cell phones, scabs, and all.