The world of Lowbrow Art was shocked and saddened on April 22, when 59-year-old Juxtapoz publisher Fausto Vitello died suddenly of a heart attack while riding his bike in Woodside, California. Vitello was, of course, best known for his High Speed Productions flagship skateboard publication Thrasher (which disseminated its own unique punk aesthetic vision — call it Gnarlism), but when he decided in 1994 to band together with Robert Williams, Craig Stecyk, Greg Escalante and a handful of other Lowbrow luminaries to launch a magazine to chronicle the amorphous post-punk stew of hot rods, tattoos, comics, commercial illustration and other unacceptable fringe elements of visual culture, he tapped into a global vein of art-world frustration and catapulted Lowbrow from a local subculture into an international phenomenon.
more from the LA Weekly here.