Full Time Artists Web Log

This is the basic story of how the FTA crew came to be. Its a sordid tale & not really G-rated. Please don’t complain if you voluntarily read this & get mad in the process.

FTA, “Full Time Artists”: that was the original name. I’ve always thought it was great name. Nearly 20 years after the name & the crew were first conceived we are still around. We get a ton of questions, interview requests & students looking for information for papers etc. By far the most popular questions center around how FTA got started & how we managed to build businesses around our art. This article will answer a lot of those questions.

FTA Blackbook Sketch 1990

FTA was of course the street name of our crew before it was the name of our business or our website. A trademark & service mark for  “Full Time Artists” was finally registered in 2005 after having used the name commercially since around 1995 & on the street since 1991. I did not create FTA originally & I am not the only one left today. I am not the leader, there is no leader, no boss or CEO. FTA is a collective with a nearly 20 year history who’s members have created brands like Highground, Graffiti Fonts, Outline Clothing, Killafornia, Riot Gear, Cukui & more.

In the year 1991 most of the writers that would form FTA were in junior high. Some of us were already in other graffiti crews, dance crews, even silly little street-gangs by then. Our originator, a young writer who went by the name “Gas One” decided to form his own graff crew & with the help of his four cousins ranging in age from about 13 to about 18 he formed F.T.A. (Full Time Artists). The 5 of them were all writers as well as Hip-Hop music enthusiasts. They possessed skills as graffiti artists as well as skills on the turntables & on the dancefloor. Gas would even drop a rhyme now & then. The name itself is derived in a sort of abstract way from the Leaders of the New School track “PTA”. The original roll call went: Gas, Germ, Luky, Soul.

Golf One FTA 1992 (first piece by Gaze)

The first non-cousins to join the crew were Chan & Fierce. Jare  (Jaer) came in next and helped bring the crew to a new level. He was a good painter & heavy on the scene even at a young age. He had a fast & simple style & good can-control. All of the FTA dudes had heavy styles but at the time Jare was our best painter. My own connection to FTA starts with the next member to join after Jare. His name was Jay. Jay was from my home town & went to my high school. Through him a southbay branch of the crew was started.

I encountered FTA in my freshman year of high school. A couple classmates (Gufe & Golf ) who I knew to be writers from our common junior high had joined the FTA crew sometime in 1992 through Jay. Those 2 along with Jay & Chan were representing FTA in San Jose & Milpitas. At first we did not really get along. They dissed me all the time. I didn’t really give a shit about them anyway, I had my own crew called C.E.S. … but… the way they hated on me made me try a lot harder & they were really the only other people I knew who did real pieces.  I thought they had dope styles. Through randomness I joined a major, local DJ crew called “3-Style Attractions” as an artist & wannabe DJ. Chan of FTA was also an active member of 3 Style.

Rase 1993 (first piece with FTA)

One day Gaze & Shae (they were writing Golf & Gufe at the time) invited me to paint with them at “the art gallery” in San Jose. I went, painted the terrible piece you see above. met the crew & joined that day. It was my 4th real piece on the street & I had done much better before so I really hated it. Chan & Jay quickly fell out of the crew for some reason & a few names changed leaving Gaze (Golf), Shae (Gufe) & myself (Rase) to hold it down for FTA in the south bay. I was just settling on the name Rase having used it amongst other names (Moves, Freak, Rak) for a while. Just after I joined the crew Jare’s partner Demo who was a dope character artist also joined. This is the point when the crew really started to function as we all fed off of each other & taught each other new styles & new techniques.

Germ & Gaze Art Gallery 1993

At the time (Circa 1994) the youth was awash in gangsterism & long & massive trend of tagging was still going strong. Taggers were basically writers who only did tags. Some did throw ups, some even did pieces but there were thousands of them & most only tagged. Some of these dudes had super ill styles that took years of practice & San Jose had a style all its own. All of the FTA dudes were practitioners of this south bay style but the taggers were a different breed. The media comically called them “tag-bangers”. Don’t get me wrong, fools were bangin’ for real. It’s not funny at all but ultimately however people should not be “bangin” in general so most writers didn’t really appreciate the bad press. It caused a huge crackdown & added to the older generations assumptions that we were all on drugs, in gangs & dangerous & out to destroy shit. Truthfully all to many of us were affiliated and/or stoned but it was just not as serious as it seemed. We lived mostly in the burbs & though gangs are ever present & sometimes dangerous they are just people like us, we interacted with them, sometimes badly but we were not in fear of or oppressed by them. The tagging crews and the gangs were sometimes one & the same & the crews certainly fought like gangs sometimes but the tagging crews had at least one non-violent option to resolve their conflicts on the street; a battle. In FTA’s early years we were in constant battles with small tagging crews & the strange “party crews” that existed then. (We called them discos). FTA was a small crew but we had a lot of friends. We were never really the toughest  but we fought when we had to and never really lost any ground.  I dropped out of school in 1994 & went off the radar for a while. Art was the only good thing in my life at that point. My mother who was also my main artistic mentor had almost lost a battle with brain cancer & my family life was full of other issues (a lot of which were my fault) that I wont mention here. It took a while for me to put myself back together but even in the darkest times art & music soothed my soul & kept me relatively sane.

The FTA roll Call started to expand. I ran with a crew of fellow deviants many of whom busted rhymes & did graffiti art, they were my close friends. We acted savage & anticipated the end of the world together. It was like the movie “Kids” but with no rape or aids & very few skateboard beatings. They showed me punk rock & grunge & I showed them underground Hip-Hop. It was a great time to be at the cutting edge of wasted youth. It was like the summer of love only years long & with no love.

Blackbook sketch by Ashe One 1995

During this hazy 1994-95 period we added Ash (Ashe) to the roster in the same day as Kare (better known to most as “Megabusive”) & Gyse (a.k.a. “Unbreakable Comb”) along with Dim (a.k.a. Triangulum) all in one meeting in a school yard.With all these new dudes we had to many emcees not to start a rap group.  Tagging crews were largely gone by then leaving only the most hard core. Other writers and old enemies were now our friends rather than rivals & the era of underground Hip-Hop was in bloom. FTA was well connected to the underground Hip-Hop movement. We were part of a tiny second generation that was 10x the size of the first generation. Those who came after us would in kind be ten times our number.

R.I.P. Germ By Raseone 1995

in 1995 Germ passed away from leukemia after a short but fearless battle with the invincible disease. He came on his crutches to hang out with us until he couldn’t do it anymore and eventually we all visited him almost in denial or maybe ignorance as slowly left us. I was close to the original FTA cousins & Germ was my friend. I always thought he was going to get better. His passing bonded the crew even further.

by 1996 The full roster included (in order):
Gas, Luky, Fierce, Jare, Gaze, Shae, Rase, Demo, Ashe, Kare, Dim, Gyse, Bible

In some ways these were the golden years. In other ways we were just young, dumb & toy. Some of us were getting in lots of trouble. Having originated as a crew that took pride in old-school hip-hop we all ways felt like we represented the new school so we started writing “RNS” (representing new school). In common form for the day one name was never good enough & no meaning was ever too cryptic so we usually wrote “RKS” (Representing Knew School). It was like an alias for FTA but times changed & it did not stick.

We painted, wrote rhymes, worked in our sketchbooks & got in trouble. usually in a large rowdy group. We were civilized but angry, life had been a bit hard on most of us. We were different than most of our peers in that we were artists & musicians but in a genre that most people didn’t even know existed. Hip-Hop was huge at the time & we considered what we did to be “real Hip-Hop”. We may have even had somewhat of a superiority complex about it. It was hard not to hate on the masses of posers & fake gangsters that were running around at the time. For a while we became aggressive & a little dark. For me personally I was tired of being an easy target  & was trying to learn how to stick up for myself. We picked fights & got loaded to much. We got in trouble with the law & people worse than the law. We partied too hard & took pride in every stupid thing we did. The t-shirt companies & record labels we dreamed up in the early days fell aside for women & drama, drugs & legal issues, money & mayhem of all sorts… shit that belongs on Maury or Cops. We inadvertently split into a few groups based on partially on geography & partially on drama.

Hip-Hop Night & club Cocodrie 1996

My faction of the crew was heavy into music and eventually re-entered the now booming underground music scene under the FTA name forming the Highground label with help from SFSMs Joe Dub. This action helped solidify the fact that FTA was not just a graff crew but a genuine fixture in the local Hip-Hop culture. Other groups were much more famous than us but a lot of those more famous artists $ crews were FTA fans & to us that was dope. All of a sudden we got a little love instead of the standard haterism.  The music world was less hostile than the graffiti world. FTA was painting constantly, taking risks, making a name in the world on two fronts & now a third. Highground blossomed into a legitimate small business & Outline Clothing at its side. We started to grow up a bit & behave ourselves sometimes. Paws one had entered the crew after being our homie forever. He would unfortunately also die of Leukemia at age 22. Strange and terrible coincidence for FTA. Like Germ, when Paws passed on he would be memorialized in murals, tattoos & blackbooks. Paws called me the day before he passed & told me that he loved me & Shae & Mega & all of us & that we should be good to each other, forget the bullshit & keep doing our thing. The culture & art of Hip-Hop was very important to him. My last conversation with him was long & it was a mix of his love & concerns for all of his friends as well as his faith in the overall culture & how important it is. Words & inspiration from Paws continue to help drive our pursuits today.

By 2000 two FTA members were fathers now & two others had passed away.  Some were having problems with the law or their families. Each of the main FTA dudes had their own posse & we started coming together sometimes like some giant super crew. With people painting & getting up, doing art shows & canvases, recording, performing, dancing & battling & mixing & scratching & running small Hip-Hop based businesses FTA was becoming more than a crew. Unfortunately by this time we were also drifting apart as people grew up & had responsibilities, as drama between us made things more difficult. Some people moved, some stayed. By our 10 year, in 2003 FTA was almost gone. Highground & Outline Clothing were doing well & several people from the crew had migrated to New York. The remaining San Jose cats, Shae, Rase, Dim, Jaer, Mega, Demo, Fierce, UBC still represented & on an individual level most of us still saw FTA as being alive & well but truthfully we almost dissolved at this point. A lot has changed since then. FTA is stronger than ever in 2010 but that is another story.

2009