The North Dakota Museum of Art invites the public to a Gallery Talk featuring artist, SHOCK UC MSK, whose work is on display in the current exhibition, Re-arming Language: Post-graffiti Artists. Shock lives and works between New York and everywhere else. He is a painter, sculptor, and multidisciplinary artist whose practice stems from the long tradition of graffiti writing. A member of the legendary MSK crew, Shock has spent the past two decades building a body of work rooted in movement, adaptation, and raw creative force. The event is on Thursday, April 9, 4:30 – 6 p.m. held in the Museum galleries.
The gallery talk and reception, including hors d'oeuvres and beverages, with Shock is free and open to the public. The artist will reflect on his work on display in the Museum and address the ideas that influence his creative process. He will be available for questions from the audience following the talk.
About SHOCK UC MSK: Born in the Midwest and raised between cityscapes, Shock’s early education came from walls, rooftops, freight yards, and underground publications. He developed a reputation not just for his distinctive visual style, but for his relentless work ethic and commitment to the evolution of the form. His current practice spans painting, sculpture, video, printmaking, sound, installation, design, and performance.
Shock’s work navigates the space between personal myth and public language. Equally informed by graffiti’s coded systems and painting’s formal concerns, his work refuses categorization. Whether abstract or figurative, still or moving, it remains unmistakably his: layered, immediate, and emotionally precise.
A respected figure in both underground and institutional spaces, Shock has exhibited nationally and continues to produce ambitious projects across disciplines. His work resists convention, favors intuition, and reflects the world back to us—unfiltered, layered, and alive.
On display at the Museum: Re-arming Language: Post-graffiti Artists features screen prints and mixed-media constructions that share a kinship with graffiti culture and its intersections with Hip Hop and Punk Rock music as well as the subcultures associated with skateboarding, comic books, and zines. Although the works are stylistically diverse and produced by artists from different racial, socio-economic and geographic backgrounds, a common thread can be found in a shared desire to liberate language in order to transform it, or in the words of Joe Ellis, to “re-arm it” as a means to resist systems of power inherently embedded in language. For example, the designs by renowned graffiti artist Stephen Powers (aka ESPO) are inspired by traditional sign painting used in advertising, but he substitutes the language of commerce with the language of emotion or witty social aphorisms. Channeling the directness, clarity, and rhetorical force of commercial slogans, Power’s phrases speak of love, loneliness, and social injustice rather than commodities or services.