Petie Parker
October 28, 2023: Queens native Kareem Thompson (who goes by the alias Petie Parker) is Atlanta’s Black Spider Man. Parker loved playing football as a kid, received a college football scholarship and even played some arena football but disliked the business of football. The discipline and dedication learned during his football years carries over into his artwork today. While in College, he also studied web design and subsequently worked as a web designer for 15 years. During this time he also received his introduction to the art world by managing visual artists and photographers and helping them to run their social media and connect with buyers.
When Petie began his own social media presence, he developed the “Petie Parker” alter ego as an homage to his favorite childhood superhero: Spiderman. Parker even posted to social media disguising his identity with a Spiderman mask. The artist identified with Spiderman because of several coincidental similarities between the two: both are from Queens, both are nerds, both have an Aunt May, and during the artist’s web design days, both slung “webs”. The brand stuck and became a valuable marketing asset for him. Atlantans like the idea of having a Black Spiderman, especially the kids.
In 2017 Parker’s mentor Miya Baily established Peters Street Station as an art and design community center created to facilitate and create a safe space for creative incubation and creative expression for the local art community. Baily brought Petie Parker in to be the general manager. Parker has no shortage of ideas and is willing to try them out, to possibly fail, and to move on. In 2020 during the Covid pandemic, Petie had some free time on his hands and tried his hand at painting. Parker quickly became laser focused on his new craft. His very first painting was sold to the producer of Hunger Games, which Parker personally drove out to Los Angeles to deliver. Parker decided that his art would be his career for the rest of his life. His first exhibition was called Heartbreaks and Heroes. The “heartbreaks” refer to the damage to some of Parker’s personal relationships that became secondary to the artist’s hyperfocus on his work. But now the artist fully owns his intense focus on his work and is through apologizing for it.
Petie’s work highlights the beauty of Black women. The Artist often wears black and the color black plays a prominent role in his work. The backgrounds of most of Parker’s murals and paintings feature a black-on-black pattern where the interplay between gloss black and flat black create an almost hidden secondary painting that dynamically changes as the light hits it from different angles. Some of the artist’s paints must be specially ordered to exactly create the desired effect. Applying the initial black layer to a canvas or mural is therapeutic for the artist.
Parker describes his style as “loose and sketchy, I keep making movements and marks until I actually start to see something rather than trying to be so precise. A lot of times I’m just scribbling until I start to see something.” Painting murals is his favorite part of being an artist. Parker enjoys the large scale of the work, the solitude of the times on the wall alone, and the interactions with passersby. The Spiderman analogy even applies to murals because in addition to “slinging webs” Petie Parker now “crawls walls”. Recently, Petie has become confident enough in the quality of his work to step out from behind the Spiderman social media identity and let his own presence shine through.
Link to Petie Parker’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/petieparker/
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