IST 605: Art, Culture & History of Skateboarding

Skateboarding as a culture has a long visual and material history that documents how skaters interact with the wider environment around them. Street skateboarding in particular, the variant of skateboarding that requires participants to venture out and away from dedicated and often poorly designed skateparks, has adopted a more subversive and “underground” tone than more mainstream variants of skating. Within this context, skateboarding is a culture that emphasizes the preservation of objects. With such a material culture, things like boards, clothes, photographs, videos, art, and magazines are all uniquely emphasized within the wider street skating community in order to detail the evolution and progression of skateboarding as a cultural force.

KJ Thomas - Ollie - Washington D.C. (2025) Photo: Owen Basher
The purpose of this guide is to connect some of the resources out there that document skateboarding's unique cultural aspect and to highlight some of the more marginalized voices who also participate in the counter-culture of street skateboarding. Broadly, this guide presents resources related to skateboarding literature, arts, and history. This guide will be useful to people who are interested in skateboarding as a subversive culture. Additionally, this guide will be helpful for folks interested in the photography, journalism, academic literature, urban design philosophies, and the historiographies that all have emerged from the arena of street skateboarding.

Below are some of the sources and search tools that were used to locate the materials for this guide. Please note that keywords related to name, location, and year combined with the general term "skateboarding" are very helpful in locating materials relevant to a user's needs. 

• University Libraries:
  UAlbany's Primo discovery platform which is integrated with Alma, UAlbany's library service platform. This tool is helpful for finding materials within the library's collections. Keyword searching combined with a Boolean operator and "skateboarding" often leads to precise results.  
   
• UAlbany's Database Finder:
  A discovery tool that contains over 400 subject specific databases that UAlbany provides subscription access to. This tool is helpful for locating peer reviewed articles and other materials that are not within the library's collection but are still accessible via the library's subscription.
   
• Gale General OneFile: 
  This database provides access to articles featured in skateboarding magazines such as Thrasher as well as skateboarding related stories that have appeared in newspapers like the New York Times. 
   
• EBSCOhost eBook Academic Collection
  An academic eBook database that was extremely useful in locating peer-reviewed articles in academic journals.
   
• Thrasher Magazine's Cover Archive:
  Thrasher has archived every cover of it's print publication going back to 1981. Some issues, especially older ones from the late 80's and early to mid 90's, are available to view in full through this page. 
   
• Slap Magazine's community message boards:
  A great place to keep up with the latest stories and gossip in the world of skateboarding. The photos/videos board in particular has many posts about skateboarding's visual heritage.
   
• San Diego State University's Surf and Skate Research Guide:
  This research guide compiles many skate related items found in the collections SDSU's University Library. Additionally, this research guide provides links to pertinent websites, external web resources, and organizations related to the study of skateboarding. 
   
• WorldCat:
  WorldCat and the OCLC are the global catalog of library materials. This resource is extremely helpful in locating bibliographic data about resources that are outside of UAlbany's collection. Searching by the ISBN number of an available resource will result in a precise match. 
   
• Google
   
• Youtube
   

It should also be noted that due to the physical and community centric nature of skateboarding's material culture, many resources such as zines, self published books, online blogs, and social media accounts are only discoverable through direct interaction with the skateboarding community. A great way to foster interaction is through skateshops, many of which have dedicated collections of skateboarding centric items like magazine archives and other ephemera that chronicles the history and culture of skateboarding in the local scene and whose owners are more than happy to dork out about skating.