True (artist)

TRUE, formerly known as David John Riggins (b. 1968, Los Angeles, California) is an American artist, designer, filmmaker, and producer of German-Russian, African-American, and Blackfoot Confederacy descent who lives in New Orleans, LA[1]. He began using the word “TRUE” in place of his birth name in the mid-1990s[2]. His career has incorporated illustration, graphic design, animation, and filmmaking[3]; his current focus is producing cultural events.

He began his professional career in the late 1980s as a set painter for Roger Corman Studios in Venice Beach, California[4]. He moved to New York in 1991 to study at Sarah Lawrence College, and then transferred to The Art School of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (BFA, 1996). He first gained international recognition for a series of non-permissional site-specific “guerrilla” installations on the streets of Los Angeles[5] and New York City[6], and in NYC’s subway system[7] (1993–1994), which were done anonymously. When tracked down for comment by the press, he used a pseudonym (“str8up” [pronounced “straight up”])[8] both because he wanted to preserve his anonymity so that the focus would remain on the work and not himself, and also to protect himself from prosecution for “tampering [and] theft of government property[9].” The motivation for these projects was the belief that the “art world” was unnecessarily ethnocentric and elitist, and that art could have a much broader audience if it could also be seen outside the constraints of “official” art institutions[10].

His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), in Brooklyn, New York, Restoration Plaza in Brooklyn, New York, and the Centro Cultural de Belém, in Lisbon, Portugal, as part of the Experimentadesign Bienal de Lisboa. He has taught or spoken about art, new media, and design at institutions such as The Cooper Union, The New School University, Parsons The New School for Design, Pratt Institute, Rhode Island School of Design, and Sarah Lawrence College, among others.

He has been interviewed and / or had his work featured in: All Things Considered (National Public Radio)[11]; Arc Design Magazine (Brasil) (discusses TRUE’s work in the Lisbon Biennial)[12]; AREA (a Phaidon design book that named TRUE as one of 100 of the world’s “most innovative emerging graphic designers”)[13]; BBC-TV (UK); Crain’s New York Business[14]; Deseret News[15]; Diseña, Crea, Siente: El Poder del Diseño Grafico para Generar Emociones (Design, Create, Thrill: The Power of Graphic Design to Spark Emotions)[16]; Eye Magazine (in which designer Stefan Sagmeister refers to TRUE’s subway stickers as “the one piece of graphic design that truly influenced me”)[17]; GalleryBeat (TV); How Design Magazine[18]; I.D. (International Design) Magazine (who named TRUE as one of the “I.D. Forty” [40 of the world’s “leading design innovators”])[19]; Los Angeles Times[20][21]; M.A.P. Magazine (Australia)[22]; Manhattan File Magazine[23]; Men’s Club Magazine (Japan)[24]; Metropolis Magazine (who named TRUE as a “rising star of the new millennium”)[25]; New York Daily News[26]; New York Magazine[27][28]; New York Times[29]; The New York Times Magazine[30]; Pix Magazine; The Practical Handbook for the Emerging Artist[31]; Sagmeister: Made You Look,[32]; Stefan Sagmeister’s TED Talk, “Happiness By Design”[33]; Surface Magazine[34]; Time Out New York[35]; The Village Voice[36] and others. An educational CD-ROM video game for which TRUE did illustration, animation, and UI design won the top award, the “Palm d’Or,” at the MILIA Interactive Conference in Cannes, France.[37]

Before moving to New Orleans, he lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where he received numerous[38] public art commissions[39], and where he founded a free annual children’s film festival called The KIDflix Film Fest of Bed-Stuy!. He now lives in New Orleans, LA[40], where he produces New Orleans’ first-ever Black Nerd Festival called BLERDFEST![41]