Bowie 1976 — Creating NFTs for Playboy x Shantell Martin

In June 2021, Shantell Martin and I released Bowie 1976 — a collection of three original NFTs created in association with Playboy and launched as part of Nifty Pride on Nifty Gateway. The project remains one of the most creatively rewarding things I've worked on.

The Brief

The collection was inspired by Playboy's September 1976 interview with David Bowie — a wide-ranging, provocative conversation that covered identity, sexuality, fame, and reinvention. Shantell was drawn to the parts of the interview she found most shocking, particularly Bowie's candid reflections on sex, drugs, and the nature of performance.

The project launched as part of Nifty Pride — a collection of NFTs by five pairs of major visual and musical artists celebrating the LGBTQ community, alongside work from Troye Sivan and Jason Ebeyer, Charli XCX and Serwah, and The Knocks and Moist Breezy. All proceeds from the primary sales went to support GLAAD, with Playboy making an additional donation.

The Process

My role was creative direction, graphic design, and animation. I worked with the original interview text, Andrew Kent's photographs from 1976, and Shantell's intricate drawn elements — interweaving them into animated compositions that honoured the rawness of the source material while bringing something new to it.

Having freedom with these elements — Bowie's words, Kent's photographs, Shantell's line work — and the space to interpret them through my own sense of graphic design and animation was a privilege. We had a clear idea of what we wanted to accomplish, and it was particularly meaningful working on the project with GLAAD in mind.

https://vimeo.com/572569034

NFTs as Medium

Working with NFTs at that moment in 2021 felt like participating in a genuine shift in how digital art could be owned, distributed, and valued. The blockchain provided a provenance structure that gave digital work a permanence and traceability it hadn't previously had.

What interested me most was how the NFT format changed the relationship between artist and audience. The work existed as a unique, ownable object — not a reproduction, not a screenshot, but a verified original. For someone whose practice is rooted in digital processes, that distinction mattered.

The Bowie 1976 project, along with our subsequent collections Solitaire and Lapidarist, demonstrated that NFTs could be more than speculative tokens — they could be vehicles for meaningful creative work made in service of causes that matter.