Born in 1950 and raised on the West Side of Los Angeles, Craig R. Stecyk III is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has stretched across film, fine art, commercial design, writing, and photography.
Stecyk is perhaps best known for the “Dogtown Chronicles,” the groundbreaking series that appeared in Skateboarder magazine throughout the 1970s. He co-founded Zephyr, the Venice-based surf and skate shop that became the breeding ground for the hugely influential Z-Boys. Alongside documenting the scene through his writing and photography, Stecyk developed a visual language that became inseparable from Dogtown itself, creating iconic graphics including the Rat Bones and Dogtown Cross logos.
His influence extended well beyond skateboarding. Stecyk co-wrote the award-winning 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys with Stacy Peralta, helping bring the story of Dogtown and its characters to a wider audience.
Since the 1970s, Stecyk has also written extensively about surfing. Among his most celebrated pieces is “The Curse of the Chumash,” published in Surfer magazine in 1976. Focused on Malibu, the piece fused local history, surf mythology, skate culture, and a heavy dose of countercultural irony.
His artistic practice has always existed somewhere between documentation, provocation, and experimentation. For Road Rash, Stecyk collected roadkill, had the remains bronzed, and returned each piece to the exact location where it had originally been found. In 1989, he created Papa Moana, an installation built around Hawaiian objects and artifacts.
Stecyk also helped curate Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing, a major 2002 exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum. He has contributed essays to numerous surf-related books, including 1936–1942: San Onofre to Point Dume, and a surfboard shaped and painted by Stecyk is now part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian.
As filmmaker and artist Thomas Campbell puts it:
“Craig’s our patron saint of outsiderness, of being creative without bounds. His influence is so omnipresent you don’t even see it.”
In this episode of Soundings, Stecyk sits down with host Jamie Brisick to reflect on growing up along the coast of Los Angeles, the birth of the Dogtown era, the strange artifacts that find their way into an artist’s life, and the challenge of creating work that can withstand time.
He also talks about getting checked out of school by the legendary Miki Dora to go surfing — a story that feels perfectly at home in the mythology of Craig Stecyk.
For more than five decades, Stecyk has operated outside the boundaries of any single discipline. Artist, photographer, writer, filmmaker, historian, provocateur — his work helped shape the visual language of surf and skate culture long before those worlds became global industries.
And maybe that’s the point.
Craig Stecyk never followed the culture. He helped create it.