* En anglais uniquement
For the last decade, Shirt (b. George Steven, USA) has shaped an oeuvre that inhabits a unique place amongst New York rap music, conceptual and performance art. An artwork titled ‘Self-Portrait’ exhibited by Shirt in 2019 at Helmhaus Museum, featured simply the names of one hundred people painted on ten white plaster tablets including: Frank Ocean, Yoko Ono, Raekwon, Nas, Arthur Jafa, Danh Vo, Lorraine O’ Grady, Jay-Z, Jai Paul and David Hammons. Born in New York City and raised in Queens, Shirt had come a long way by the time he was playing shows through Europe with Jack White in Summer 2018. From penning Flume’s chart-topping, On Top (2011) (as “T.Shirt”), to having crafted his label debut Pure Beauty (2018) while completing a Master in Fine Art degree program in Basel, Switzerland––that winter Third Man Records announced the imminent release of Pure Beauty (2018), and Shirt as the first rapper signed to the label. That album, however, was removed from streaming services due to sample clearance issues the following year. Climate Change (2018), Mise En Abyme (2018), and Energy (2018) remain on streaming platforms with their neon green digital cover art as remnants of the now unreleased project, as well as videos for the songs Snowbeach (2017), featuring an intro verse from Shirt’s barber Chase, and the audacious Flight Home (2018) video, depicting Shirt rapping on top of a moving Nike and adidas-painted box truck. Woman Of God (2018) was filmed in Sierra Leone, West Africa on a personal trip Shirt explained took place over ten days in the region.
Writing and recording verses over beats since the late 90’s, one of Shirt’s first public performances as a teenager was a half-rap, half-spoken word piece he performed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 2002. Throughout the mid 2000’s, while working various retail and coffee shop jobs, Shirt made and self-distributed rap songs, painted large canvases and mixed-media works, designed and produced small clothing collections, directed videos and performed in venues around New York City such as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Bowery Poetry Club. In 2010, he decidedly began to release art work online beginning with a string of independent rap albums Tan-Face Children (2010), I Should Just Chill (2011), and The Fuck (2012). In the same year he remixed Purity Ring’s entire Shrines (2012) album. Designing a “fake” NY Times website to drum up excitement for a new album in 2014, Shirt constructed a profile of himself pulling direct sentences from other NYT articles that acutely described the arc of his own personality and practice. The complicated work landed Shirt actual press in NPR and Pitchfork ahead of his independently released album Rap (2014). The following year he self-released the album Nike Adidas Records (2015), and a week later the ep Rap Money (2015) was announced to be distributed by the independent Chicago label Closed Sessions. Throughout this time, Shirt self-released several songs including Automatic (2013), Chuchi and Jujo (2015), Cuba (2015), Bengal Tiger (2015), and DJ Rude’s 1,000 Dutches (2016) that achieved some notoriety on pioneer rap blogs Nahright, 2DopeBoyz, XXL and SmokingSection, as well as burgeoning commercial opportunities: the song Phantom (2013) was included as end credits on HBO’s Silicon Valley series and Hollywood movies like 2019’s Stuber, while Flume’s On Top (2011) saw placement in MLB the video game and a GoPro commercial, and We Back (2015) landed an NBA commercial. In 2015, Shirt exclusively used sentences from the pages of the poet Kenneth Goldsmith's book ‘Theory’ to craft the three verses on the song Theory (2015). For Summer Not Coming (2016), Shirt debuted the track blasting it out of speakers mounted on the back of a pickup truck driven through NYC. Pirouette (2020) was initially a live Shirt performance for NPR’s Tiny Desk Series and set in an undisclosed forest location, before being included on producer Steel Tipped Dove’s own album Call Me When You’re Outside (2021). Shirt’s most recent full length album We’re Still Alive (2020), written and recorded over several months in 2020 between Queens, Brooklyn, and then Oakland, California, features production from Kaytranada, BADBADNOTGOOD, Aphex Twin, The Midnight Hour, Moby, ANOHNI and others––all used without permission or copyright clearance. The release eschewed streaming platforms altogether, instead being made available by Shirt and executive producer Darvin Silva as a free download on the avant-garde website Ubuweb. In 2021, following a solo exhibition of print, painting and sculpture held over the summer in NYC titled Elsewhere, We Remain Unreadable, Shirt performed what he described as a ‘silent rap’ from the roof of the Soho gallery. Following the announcement of the proposed recording sessions $500 On Streaming (2021), a month-long project in which anyone could engage with Shirt and pay him $500 to record verses on beats of their choice, Shirt along with the producer SHARP released the 3 song EP, I Eat What I Catch (2021) in November.