Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Skate Videos

In the late 1980s and 1990s, skateboard teams harnessed inexpensive, widely accessible video equipment to record and share limit-pushing tricks. Featuring skaters traversing stairs, benches, and other skate-able elements of public architecture, such videos assembled grainy footage of bodies in flight into music-driven montages.   

These high-energy VHS-format videos, shot with limited budgets on consumer-accessible cameras equipped with genre-defining fish-eye lenses, were circulated among skaters and sold in skate shops. They served as inspiration and instruction, a form of proto social media that bound together an avid, expanding skater community. Soon, skating and the way it was captured on video became inextricably linked, complementary forms of artistic expression. 

Recording the Ride features videos and artifacts from skate culture’s formative years, with a focus on releases by H-Street, Plan B, World Industries, Girl, Zoo York, 411, Birdhouse, and others that manifest the structure and style that defined the modern skate video genre. Highlights include artifacts from the production of The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984); a focus on Mike Ternasky and the brand Plan B, with vintage production and post-production artifacts used in the making of their seminal releases The Questionable Video (1992) and Virtual Reality (1993); and behind-the-scenes images, including photos shot by Spike Jonze—whose filmmaking career began with the production of skate videos—on the set of Video Days (1991). Period skateboard decks link the spirit and aesthetic established in these videos to the emergence of 1990s skater-owned brands. 

Organized by guest curators Jacob Rosenberg and Michaela Ternasky-Holland, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs Barbara Miller, and Director of Exhibition Management and Design Dánae Colomer.

Exhibition Sponsor:

The Museum gratefully acknowledges the generous participation of Deckaid, The Secret Tape, and Look Back Library.

About the guest curators:

Jacob Rosenberg came of age making the seminal Plan B skateboard videos in the early ’ 90s under the mentorship of Mike Ternasky. Rosenberg is a director/filmmaker who has made documentaries and commercials for such brands as Nike, Ford, Verizon, MLB, and NBA. His debut documentary, Waiting for Lightning premiered at SXSW in 2012.

Michaela A. Ternasky-Holland is a Peabody-nominated and Emmy award-winning director who specializes in creating impactful stories using immersive and interactive technology. She is one of the first directors to create and premiere a short film utilizing Open AI’s SORA platform, which screened at Tribeca Festival 2024. As a nominee for the Producers Guild of America’s Innovation Award, she is also a consultant, speaker, and thought leader, who has been recognized as one of the 100 Original Voices of XR and listed as one of Blooloop’s 50 Immersive Influencers.

Pictured: Keenan Milton and Aaron Meza. Los Angeles, 1998. Photo: blabacphoto.