Ed Templeton | Wires Crossed: The Culture of Skateboarding

In his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, the Long Beach Museum of Art presents Ed Templeton’s 17-year photographic project, Wires Crossed: The Culture of Skateboarding, 1995-2012, which explores youth culture through Templeton’s lens and peers into the lives of amateur and professional skateboarders, whom 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 subculture of skateboarding 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 being born.