The T-Shirt Playground

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Dalek, Faile, Fifty24SF Gallery, Sam Flores, Upper Playground, graffiti tees, street art fashion, urban art t-shirts

This review focuses on two of my creative mediums, urban/street art and of course t-shirt design. I’m featuring Upper Playground tees today, having been run independently for over a decade by the highly respected Fifty24SF Gallery, it’s the place where some of the big boys and girls of the street movement sell their works in all kinds of forms, including t-shirts at their store. Some of the super fine artists on their books including: Jeremy Fish, who has exhibited his work in esteemed galleries such as White Walls in San Francisco – Rinzen an Australian arts collective who have made waves in everything from fashion to illustration to design, read more about them at Format Magazine – David Ellis who’s woodcut-style intricate prints are highly respected within the urban arts scene and Hera, a German based illustrator who has designed a capsule t-shirt collection for UP based upon her own infamous and darkly comic illustrated characters.

Upper Playground also runs nine retail stores, mostly in the U.S as well as one in the UK and one in Mexico, see all the locales here. Asides the stores, their site, their blog and gallery, they also offer two other t-shirt labels which are 12 Grain by Sam Flores and Fifty24SF. These t-shirt companies feature work from some of the legends of the design and graffiti world such as Mark Bode, Iz the Wiz, Cope 2, Dave Choe, Daze, Faile, Dalek and Sam Flores. There really are too many great tees to feature in one review, but I’ll do my best to give you a brief idea of the exuberance and energetic art tees of Upper Playground… read more