Skate Culture

Some Santa Monica Localism: The Rip City Skates Board

For those of you who are wondering, this site has mainly been active as of late on my Skate Culture Facebook page, so if you into the kind of stuff we have been posting about here, make sure you go over to that page and give it a “like” because otherwise you’re missing out on all kinds of stuff that goes on there but not necessarily here.

At any rate, many of you will know how much I enjoy board art, and especially board art which is not seen as often, so I had to show you this really cool bit of Rip City localism in the form of a Rip City Santa Monica board with its classic and distinctive Wes Humpston art. I seem to recall that, quite fittingly, Rip City Skates has one of these boards hanging up in their skate shop (which also seconds as a kind of skateboarding museum with all the really legendary stuff hanging on its walls!); this particular one was picked up by a lucky skate collector by way of a local Venice skate swap.

Having watched skate collector forums for years, I can’t say that I’ve ever seen this particular board come up. As I say, the only place I have seen it is on the walls of Rip City Skates and also in Bulldog’s Art — Wes Humpston’s skate art book.

At any rate, I don’t have much any more history than that, other than to tell you that Rip City Skates had a little trouble with vandalism back in the day — that is, until Wes Humpston teamed up with them to produce some Rip City Art. As the owner Jim Bob put it, their collaboration with Wes was a bit like getting a papal blessing of sorts and, coincidentally or not, the vandalism stopped.

At any rate, check out this board.

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