Slawn and Opake bring skate-culture pop-up to Los Angeles

Slawn and Opake are turning Secret Walls HQ in Harvard Heights into a shrine to skate-culture mischief, with “Super Toy” opening May 9 at 2272 Venice Blvd. and anchoring the room with 350 hand-painted skate decks. The scarcity is the point: this is not a wall of merch made for scrolling, but a finite body of work that rewards anyone who shows up early enough to see the paint, scale and surface up close.

The pop-up doubles as a celebration of Hypebeast Magazine Issue 37, a 277-page print issue called The Architects Issue, and its collaborative cover gives the event its clearest collector appeal. Slawn, the London-based Nigerian-British-Nigerian artist whose work moves between street art and abstract expressionism, has become the name with the broadest recognition. Opake brings the quieter voltage: a London artist whose practice folds graffiti, pop art and personal reflection into a vocabulary shaped by survival.

That tension is what makes the collaboration feel lived-in rather than packaged. Hypebeast frames the partnership as brotherhood built on risk, and not the polished kind. In a separate interview, Opake said Slawn pushed him away from perfectionism and toward using a needle cap, a small technical shift that says a lot about the aesthetic here: rough edges, speed, instinct and the decision to leave the mistake in the frame.

Opake’s backstory gives the work further weight. He began writing graffiti at 13, then spent eight years living on the streets and struggling with addiction before turning to art as survival. That history has become part of the collaboration’s emotional charge, and it helps explain why the decks and the magazine cover matter as objects, not just images. A viewer can absorb the story online; the surface is what only the room will give back.

Secret Walls is also the right setting for the project’s scale. The Los Angeles campus, established in 2016, is built as a community space for art events, workshops, residencies and brand activations, which makes it a natural stage for a drop that sits between exhibition and collectible release. The earlier TABOO and Cease and Desist-era collaboration in London in 2025 shows this is a continuing partnership, not a one-off stunt. By the time the decks are gone, the online recap will still be there, but the physical evidence of Slawn and Opake’s chemistry will already be in someone else’s hands.