This piece kicks off a three-part series where Tom sits down with the founding members of Quantum to learn more about where they have been, where they are, and where they want to go as they empower creators and collectors the world over.
This interview has been slightly edited for length and clarity. It was prepared by Tom White.
Who is Kris?
Kris Graves (b. 1982 New York, NY) is an artist and publisher based in New York and California. He received his BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College and has been published and exhibited globally, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Getty Institute, Los Angeles; and National Portrait Gallery in London, England; among others. Permanent collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Institute, Schomburg Center, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum; and The Wedge Collection, Toronto; amongst others.
How would you describe yourself as a child?
As a young child, I don't remember too much. But one of the first things I do remember is sitting in an empty living room in my grandma's house where I lived with my mother, and watching Thriller and Purple Rain on VHS tapes by myself, and just watching them over and over again, all day long. So that was kind of my family upbringing—music was very important to me really early on.
Both of my parents were artists, but they couldn’t really be artists because in the 80s as Black people in New York, you had to get a job. So they got jobs, but they allowed me to go to school for art, which was really great.
I went to Purchase College. It’s an art school so the campus was filled with actors, dancers, and musicians. It was amazing and inspiring to be around that group of people. I'm glad I didn't go to school in a city. It was good to have a campus of a few thousand people. And city schools were way too expensive, to the point where my parents told me that they would pay for Purchase, but we would not be paying for a city school. They couldn't afford that. So they told me to make my choice: they pay or I pay. And I was like, “Okay! You pay.”
Even back in high school, I knew that subjects such as English, Spanish, or Math were never going to be careers for me. I didn't want to do any of those long term. For me, it was more about the arts. I was always interested in art, and I realized that photography was probably the only art you could both do alone and make money from simultaneously. Though video was interesting to me as well, you needed a team; I loved painting too, but there were kids better than me at it in my school. I figured, if there's a kid better than me at my school then there's probably millions of people better than me outside the school.
But with photography, you can learn the craft, learn the science, and create your own thing. To me, it’s easier than painting and there's more use for it because everything in the world is photos. Ads and media, they are all photo-based. In due time, I realized I could build a career out of photography and I could use it for art.
Is there a piece of advice from a family member that really influences you to this day?
Yes, I remember a quote from my grandma. She would see talented individuals on TV, but she would not think that they were very talented. Let's say Mariah Carey, right? She would see them and say: “All it really takes is nerve.”
I remember that most; it takes nerve.
It isn't really their talent level. There's a million people with talent, but if you don't have a way to get it out there and influence people or build the community around yourself then you will never be able to make it. That nerve to get in front of people to push your issue is what is really needed.
Do you remember a time when your career really took a turn/started gaining momentum? If so, when did that happen and who helped to make that possible for you?
I've just been really consistent and I’ve been doing stuff for myself all the time.
I ran my own gallery with my cousin for a few years and then got a job at the Guggenheim Museum photographing the collection. For eleven years, I was consistently doing as much freelance work as I could while maintaining a full-time job.
I also traveled as much as I could with friends. I went to new cities, I met new people, I kept taking pictures and I kept showing people those pictures.
Instagram was helpful, Facebook was helpful, MySpace was helpful before that.
Kickstarter was helpful for a few years around 2014, where you actually made a photobook based on other people giving you funds. Eventually I thought, why give Kickstarter 5%? I wanted to do it myself on my own website as I know that I could gain the traffic. Kickstarter was just a platform. Platforms will help you put your stuff out there, but they wont sell your shit. So building that community for yourself is helpful because then, when your twenty year-old friend becomes forty, they will most likely have a better job; probably have more money; have more influential friends; could even be fucking rich and famous.
So, if you're friends with these people from twenty, and you keep making good art, they will see that you are doing something culturally.
And fundamentally, that’s all I am—I'm a looker of art. I'm here to see the work.
When I see something that I can't forget, that’s what we put on Quantum.
It's all the same practice. It’s the practice of showing people a different reality. It’s something that shouldn't be about pure beauty. Showing me a beautiful landscape is totally worthless to me. It does not matter at all. If there's no cultural significance to that landscape, or you're not making a connection to the past, or to the pain of the past, it's not necessary. I think that, there's a lot of people out there that can make a really beautiful landscape. I can do it, but I don't show them so much, because it's just not my practice. I think that’s great that you can make beautiful images, and it's great that you can survive making those things, but if you're not dealing with culture, then we can't work with you.
The same goes for my own art. If it's not about the culture, then it's probably about beauty, or something else. If there's no connection to culture, then no one will care about the work. For instance, who watches MTV for music videos now? At some point it mattered because it was all about the culture, but now it's nothing.
Who are some of the most thoughtful people that you've encountered in your career? What has set those people apart?
I have a lot of friends in different fields at this point. I have a friend who was at my apartment last night named Thomas Chatterton Williams. He's an author, he writes for The New Yorker, he’s written Harper's, he's written for the you-name-it review. He's written for everybody!
But that’s all new. That all happened within the last three or four years, with his second book’s garnering some praise. But when we were kids, he was a DJ and I had him over to DJ house parties every other weekend. That was our life. We were just listening to music. We went to Berlin together to photograph some club DJs because he wanted to do an article for something in college when he was at Columbia.
I know a lot of people like that. I can go down a list of hundreds of people that have grown over the course of time. Those two are probably notable because they're doing stuff right now.
are so many photographers that I grew up with who are now killing it and making films. Another friend of mine is making a feature film now in San Francisco. We went to college together. We had the same view camera class at Purchase and now he's making a feature film and working with The Guardian.
All this stuff just happens with the work. It happens by putting in years of work. There's no overnight success in art. It does not happen. Some of the best artists I've ever known don't sell anything. They don't show their work to anybody. But they still make work that I wish that I made. I consider myself decent at photography, but I know people that are really, really good. People who I hope to be as good as one day but at this point, I am not. They motivate me to keep trying to get better.
And then, maybe when you turn thirty or thirty-five you get just one thing and that leads to a string of other things. As long as you keep consistent and as long as you keep your nerve.
What advice would you give a young person today to help them succeed?
If you think you want to do something, you have to become addicted to it. If you're not addicted to it, it's not going to work. It just won't. I think about art when I wake up. I think about it when I'm sleeping. I think about it when I'm talking to you. I'm thinking about the artists or the Quantum Collection that I'm releasing next week. I'm even thinking about a photograph that I made five years ago. I'm thinking about the music that I just played, or I'm going to play after this call. It is never off my mind.
There's always ten things in my mind at all times and maybe that's not healthy, but I think most people do think about a lot of different things. I think about art and family. Those are the only two things to me.
So, I would say for young people, you’ve got to push it. You don't have to do illegal shit. You just have to make sure that people are getting your work and that it's not about money. I don't make enough money on my photography work to make a living. I mean NFTs have changed that a little bit, but before last year, if I was just a photographer for myself—taking pictures—I'd be broke! There is no way that I could have survived.
I guess there’s a lot of things to say. In short:
Keep consistent, keep making the work, keep showing your art to people
Do your research. If you don't know who came before you, you're going to repeat shit that you didn’t know you were repeating and it's going to look like you repeated it. Other people will know that you're repeating it and you will not make a name for yourself because you repeated art that already was made.
Surround yourself with artists. If you surround yourself with artists then the world becomes an easier place. There's a lot more positivity here.
I surround myself with people that are here to have fun. And it's been fun, right? So I don't consider it work. None of this has ever been “work” for me. I think about it all the time.
It’s play and I love it, I live for it.
How would you describe Quantum? Both what it literally is/ represents and what you hope that it will become?
Quantum started as a curated photography platform. We released one piece from one collection of work per week at random to people that want to buy into a collection, not an individual piece of art.
It’s really the first time anything like that's been done in the photography world, on the grand scale we're doing. Most people buy the best pieces in a collection and don't think about the rest of the work. We make that impossible. I think it's good for both the artist and for the art. People can learn about the art they own and the art that they don't. People can get smarter about art by seeing what they like and what they don't like. That's why I am passionate about Quantum.
Now Quantum is bigger than that. We're growing into physical spaces and art residencies. It's kind of limitless.I would say that there is no “end goal” for Quantum, it just is what it is. And it will grow as this community grows.
I have no idea what this will be in six months. We simply want the best people, or at least people that bring something new to photography or art writ large. We want it to be fucking cool, right? Something that is culturally significant and shows originality. Something that people want to look at. Something that people can understand and feel.
If you can get something that people feel then that's all I'm here for. I just want people to think about this art.
Any final thoughts? If you could say something to people the world over right now, what would you say?
Two things:
Do your research on environmental issues in relation to the blockchain.
It's all about research. I do hours of research every day on this stuff. If it's not NFT specific research, it's Ethereum research, or Bitcoin research, or other companies coming into play. Research is important within both the NFT world and the traditional art space.
We want to increase access to culture. We don’t want it so only a few people can afford it. We want to be able to get people in—we're an onboarder. That's the future of Quantum as much as anything else.
We are onboarding people into the art universe, into the metaverse. In fact, we want to be the biggest onboarder of the metaverse.
Stay tuned, soon you might just be able to go to a physical location with $100 on a credit card and have an NFT by the time you leave…