The Push exhibition at Orlando Museum of Art was the first solo retrospective of J. Grant Brittain’s pioneering skateboarding photography and it had a fascinating local connection. One of Brittain’s most influential earlier shoots was a guerrilla late-night session at Orlando’s Fashion Square mall, where skateboarders took on the curved wall in front of Burdines — which, fortuitously, was a reasonable facsimile of a quarter-pipe. Local skate legend Tim Payne re-created that section of wall faithfully and artfully to scale and placed it in the entryway to the exhibition. From hiding from mall-cops in the bushes to a museum? What a ride.
This article appears in Best of Orlando (R) 2025.