Noah Scalin: Acts of Creation

by Charles McGuigan 08.2023

Noah Scalin was born to be an artist. From infancy onward he was immersed in the arts. Both his parents, Chuck and Mim, were artists, as was his sister and only sibling, Mica. But when it came time for him to go to college, Noah decided not to major in one of the visual arts. A pragmatist by nature, he instead went into another field that would, at the very least, guarantee him employment after graduation. Art, though, would not release her grip on his soul, and she followed Noah relentlessly along every path his career has taken, and today he is firmly in the embrace of his beloved.

Behind his home in Battery Park, off a patio that consumes most of the backyard, there’s a small converted garage that houses Noah’s studio. It’s an intimate space with a lot of strong natural light, and it’s cluttered with the trappings of a lifetime—toys and plastic models and masks and skulls and books and paintings and an easel, and more stuff than a god could catalog over an eternity.

“There’s so much stuff in here,” Noah says. “You know I like to just have stuff to look at. And when I started making things during the pandemic, and I was so isolated, I’d look at what was around me and then I’d use that stuff to make art.” 

Noah begins talking about his early education in Richmond—a short stint at Cary and then at Fox Elementary School, which was fine. Then came the horrors of middle school at Albert Hill.  “I hated middle school,” he says (who doesn’t?). “I had a couple of great teachers, and they were the people who kept me sane. They treated us like human beings, and they talked to us about interesting topics. The rest of the day was just torture. It was terrible, just terrible.”

Fortunately the sentence at Hill was brief—just three years—and then it was off to high school. “I went to Open and it was a lifesaver. I loved every bit of it. We got left to our own devices.”

It was at Open that something began to dawn on the budding artist. “Even though both my parents were artists they were also both teachers, and so my understanding was there was no job called artist,” says Noah. “I was always thinking practically, like how am I going to make a living. And I couldn’t figure out how art would do that.”

In high school, Noah volunteered backstage at Theatre IV. “I helped build sets and props, and I loved it,” he says. As graduation approached, Noah had a eureka moment. He considered the work he had done at Theatre IV, which seemed, in many ways, like an “art” job. And he thought,‘Why don’t I go to school for theatre design?’

And so he enrolled in the tech track of NYU’s theatre department. There he would learn set and costume and sound design, along with stage management. Noah would learn virtually everything necessary to put on a stage production, from construction and electrical work to painting and drafting. “I learned it all,” he says.

This was in the era just before everything went digital. “When we did audio it was tape splicing,” says Noah. “I learned photography in college and it was all darkroom photography. We didn’t have Photoshop. When I did drafting, it was all with pencils on paper.”

Noah not only learned how to build sets, and set up lighting and sound systems, he also became proficient at organizing.  “I was figuring out budget and schedule and timing,” he says. “How to work with people, how to collaborate, how to get things done with no money.” He could actually put on a full stage production for under 25 dollars. He would hunt down discarded pieces on the streets, use old sheets of cardboard that he painted for backdrops. These were all skills Noah would use as he became what he always really was—an artist. 

Just after graduation, way back in 1994, Noah returned to Richmond, and was hired by Mimi Regelson who owned Exile, that one-of-a-kind shop on West Grace Street in the lower Fan. “That store was the coolest place on earth,” he says. “I’ll never forget one of the first things Mimi said to me: ‘This is the deal, the customer is not always right. You are. If you don’t like somebody, kick them out.’”

He worked for Mimi for about six months, and was then offered a job up in New York as assistant to the marketing director at Troma Entertainment, a film company that specializes in low-budget horror films. In his senior year at NYU he had worked at Troma as an intern. 

Noah scooped up the job at Troma and moved back to New York. Two weeks after he started this job, his boss quit, thrusting Noah into the position of marketing director for a film company. “I helped them get their first computer, their first email address, their first website,” he says.  While at Troma he worked side by side with James Gunn who would go on to become a prolific writer and director, well-known for his Guardian of the Galaxies franchise.  

“And then I changed my job from marketing director to art director and I did all the graphics,” says Noah. “I redesigned their logo that they’re still using today. I learned a ton there, but they worked you to death.”

Burnout came within a year and half and then Noah went to work as assistant to the art director at a clothing company called Avirex. “They were making reproduction bomber jackets, and this was in the mid-nineties hip hop scene.” Two years later he was promoted to art director. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he says.  “The bosses there were nuts. They would yell at employees and have crazy meetings, and I would hide in my office.” In all Noah spent about four years with Avirex. 

All during that time in New York, Noah had been doing freelance work for his theatre connections, so he was pretty much working constantly from sunup till well after sundown, seven days a week.  And it was crushing him.

“But I saved up enough money so that I could just do free-lance work,” Noah tells me.  So, he up and moved back to Richmond and started his own design firm called ALR (Another Limited Rebellion) Design. 

“I was doing logos and some branding work,” he says. “I did a lot of graphic design and illustration work for theatre clients and small businesses. I had freedom to make anything I wanted that represented the show.” 

During this time, Noah also began teaching basic software design classes at VCU. “I was teaching students how to use Photo Shop, how to use Illustrator, how to use Quark Express,” he says. 

And his design company had really taken off. It was somewhat different than other design houses. “The thing that made my company stand out was that I wasn’t just a design firm,” says Noah. “It was what I called a socially conscious design firm. So my idea was that I wanted to put my ethics into the business.” That’s something that was instilled in Noah by his parents. His mother was an ardent activist, and often took her son to marches and protests.

 “I always believed passionately in doing good,” Noah says. “I would go to marches and do what I could to be an activist. I wanted to combine activism with design work, and I wanted to figure out how to make a living doing good in the world.”

Which led him to teaching another class at VCU. This one was about ethics and how it applied to graphic design.  “At VCU they were teaching students how to do the technical stuff and the history of design, but not the ethics,” says Noah. “Using art to communicate visually is very powerful. It draws people in and it convinces them of ideas. That’s how propaganda works. It’s powerful stuff.”

The class, which Noah would teach for almost a decade. was called Design Rebels, and each semester it filled to capacity. 

In 2007, Noah created something that would cast a limelight on him. His business was doing well, but he was tired of the rote.  “I needed to do something else,” he recalls. “So I randomly came up with this idea that I would make skull art every day for a year.” That was in June, and halfway through the year the project had received so much attention online that Noah was fast developing a national following. 

“I appeared on the Martha Stewart Show, I got a book deal, art shows, opportunities to travel and talk,” he says. “It was wild. I used different techniques, different materials, different styles every day of the year. So that just turned into this opportunity to show people that I was an artist. All this time I knew I was an artist, but I had fallen into theatre and then graphic design and I was making a living, but I wasn’t really expressing myself. Suddenly my design work became less interesting.”

So he told all of his clients this: “Look, I’m an artist,  so if you want to hire me to make art I will, but if you want to hire me to do design, hire someone else. If I do something for you, I want to make what I want to make.” One by one his clients dropped him, but that was fine with Noah.

While hanging an art show at Quirk Gallery he ran into Andy Stefanovich, a speaker and consultant, who urged Noah to talk with business leaders about art and process in a business context. This led to the company he and his sister created, a sort of consulting agency where Noah teaches corporate executives about creativity.   

As he pulled away from graphic design, Noah began concentrating more on portraiture. And then he was invited by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to create an installation that would only be on display for a few hours. Noah had this idea, a far fetched one, that would ultimately lead him in an entirely new direction in his art.

He reached out to Diversity Thrift and they agreed to deliver a truckload of old clothes to the VMFA’s marble hall. “I worked on it all day long,” he says. His objective was a portrait of an unidentified Richmond Black man from the 1800s, who was photographed by one of the first prominent Black photographers in America who had run a studio here in town. It was to be an anamorphic image, a long and distorted visage, made entirely out of used clothing. “I just manipulated the fabric and used the color,” says Noah. “It was super fun.” He worked on the piece all day long, and it only lasted for several minutes in the early evening, but it was captured on video and received a lot of attention on TV and online. It led to other similar installations he would create in Brazil and in New York City.

And perhaps most importantly, this process of producing skewed portraits with different material, paved the way for a revolutionary means of making art. It all started eight years ago when Noah’s daughter was just two years old. He marveled at the way his daughter piled stickers randomly on top of one another.

At about that time Noah began a thirty-day project based on song lyrics. Just a week into this project, the song “The Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie began playing in a continuous loop in his skull.  He stared for a long while at the refrigerator door where his daughter’s layered sticker art was. And he thought, ‘Now wouldn’t it be cool if I could make a picture of Kermit the Frog entirely out of stickers.’ 
It was painstakingly slow work (after all, he was working in an entirely new medium), but when it was finished and he posted it online the response was unbelievable. “People went crazy for it,” Noah says. “A gallery in Miami said they wanted my sticker art.” And then the commissions began pouring in. “And I started pushing myself to see what I could do with it. I’ve done images from Birds of America. I’ve reproduced album covers. I started doing book covers.”

He also began doing incredible pieces that brimmed with artistic innovation and social consciousness. But these were more than simple statements of protest. These pieces, made up entirely of kiddie stickers, captured some of the most riveting events in history. 

One, of course, was of the brave civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, who, as a little girl, integrated William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana. The reaction of the locals was a disgusting display of white supremacist bullying aimed at a little girl who was just six years old at the time. Their behavior was repulsive. 

And then he found out about another young Black civil rights activist. Two years before Ruby’s actions, Dorothy Counts, a fifteen-year old high school student in Charlotte, North Carolina was one of the first black students to attend the all-white Harry Harding High School. 

“She wore a long ribbon on a dress that her grandmother made,” Noah says. “And a massive crowd of white people gathered around her and they were throwing rocks at her and spitting at her and she got into the school and the torment never stopped.”

Based on one of many photos that documented this deplorable event, Noah went to work on the largest child’s sticker piece he has ever made. At six-feet long and about three feet wide, the work is panoramic in its scope, and it has an immersive quality that causes the viewer to actually witness what this horrific moment in time was like. “Here’s this girl standing so poised, on her way to school,” he says. “And she is surrounded by a town full of people that just hate her and are being abusive to her.”

When I first encountered these pieces by Noah, I immediately thought of the post-impressionist Georges Seurat, father of chromoluminarism and pointillism. Like Seurat, and other great artists, Noah Scalin has given birth to another form of expression, and by so doing has changed the world for the better.