About YKTFV
You Know The F*cking Vibes. A saying that I’ve always felt like was an exclamation of freedom whenever it’s used. Whether it’s a night out in the city or relaxing by a beach reading, YKTFV expresses that joy someone has while freely expressing themself and their current vibe. Every artwork and garment that’s produced by me always has the same goal of capturing something unique within the details that it’s not replicable. I want every customer to have certainty that the piece of work they own doesn’t exist in anyone else’s home. The uniqueness within every piece allows the customer to find something that resonates with them or request a special commission to truly make it their own.
I’m a Chicago-born graffiti writer and artist whose practice comes from the same mathematical and creative thinking I’ve carried since I was young, when the margins of finished math worksheets became space for drawing. Across my work, I’m constantly sketching, testing, revising, and rebuilding until an idea feels resolved enough to become physical. That process matters to me because I don’t want the final piece to feel accidental or thin. I want the work to catch someone immediately, then keep opening up the longer they spend with it.
Graffiti is the foundation of how I understand form, color, balance, and movement. Through graffiti, I learned how to make something feel structured without killing its energy, and how to build a composition that feels intentional while still alive. A lot of what I carry into other mediums comes from that background: the way colors push against each other, the rhythm of a line, the weight of a shape, and the discipline needed to keep refining a style over time. More than anything, graffiti taught me authenticity. Concrete walls don’t paint themselves overnight, and the kind of work I’m chasing won’t happen overnight either. That patience shapes how I move through every material I use.
Ceramics has become a major part of that journey because clay lets me push graffiti out of flat space and into physical form. When I’m painting letters, I’m already thinking about depth, shadow, flow, and how a piece moves across a surface. Clay gives those same ideas weight, presence, and dimension. A line can become an edge, a fill can become a surface, and a letter can become an object someone encounters from multiple angles. I’m still thinking through rhythm and structure, but ceramics forces those ideas to exist with space, texture, and the unpredictability of firing. That tension between control and chance keeps the work alive for me.
Fashion and textiles connect to my work because they allow my ideas to exist on the body instead of only on a wall, page, or pedestal. My interest in fashion started early through my mom’s work in luxury retail and from watching my older brothers develop their style, but clothing eventually became something more personal: another way to translate graffiti into identity, movement, and presence. Through YKTFV, I think about garments as one-of-one objects that carry the same energy as a tag or piece. They assert style and individuality, but they still require planning, patience, and construction. Screenprinting, vinyl, sewing, puff lettering, quilting, and cut-and-sewn work all make me think in layers, where the image has to be built through process instead of simply placed on a surface. In that way, fashion feels closely tied to graffiti because both move through public space, both communicate before they explain themselves, and both give people a way to claim visibility in everyday life.
