Craig Stecyk

Born in 1950, raised on the west side of LA, Craig R. Stecyk III is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans film, fine art, commercial design, writing, and photography.

He's widely known for the "Dogtown Chronicles," which featured in Skateboarder magazine in the 1970s. In fact, Stecyk co-founded Zephyr, which spawned the hugely influential Z-Boys. During that time, in addition to documenting the scene through his writing and photography, he applied his singular graphic design sensibility to create the Rat Bones and the Dogtown Cross. Later, he co-wrote the award-winning 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys with Stacy Peralta, which further chronicled the Dog Town scene and its characters.

Since the 1970s Stecyk's written many pieces about surfing, most notably "The Curse of the Chumash," which appeared in Surfer in 1976. Focused on Malibu, it blended local history, surf-skate mythology, and a heap of counterculture irony. His art installations include Road Rash, in which he scraped up roadkill, bronzed it, and returned it to the exact spot where he'd found it. In 1989 he made Papa Moana, featuring Hawaiian objects and artifacts. He helped curate Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing, a 2002 exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. He's written essays for several surf-related books, among them 1936-1942: San Onofre to Point Dume. A surfboard shaped and painted by Stecyk resides in the permanent archive of the Smithsonian.

As filmmaker and artist Thomas Campbell puts it, "Craig's our patron saint of outsiderness, of being creative without bounds. His influence is so omnipresent you don't even see it."

In this episode of Soundings, Stecyk sits down with host Jamie Brisick to talk about growing up in coastal Los Angeles, the Dogtown era, the strange artifacts that find their way into an artist's life, the challenge of making something that withstands time, and getting checked out of school by Miki Dora to go surf.

Presented by Rainbow® Sandals

Produced by Jonathan Shifflett

Music by PazKa (Aska Matsumiya & Paz Lenchantin)

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