TYGAHBIKE

In July 2024 I gave my bike a makeover. I spray-painted it orange and drew zig-zag stripes all over the frame. It has holographic reflective handelbar tape, a UV-LED string that I soldered myself for the wheel, and hand painted sign on the pannier bag, “DROP THE CHARGES ON THE UHURU 3”. It also has a Palestinian flag, and my favorite patch from my old backpack.

The TYGAHBIKE story begins in 2009, when I first moved to Berlin Germany for an Artist Residence program. I built a bike from scratch at the KØPI bike workshop within days of moving there and discovering that punk squatted castle. I sawed off all the gear cogs with an angle grinder because I wanted a one-speed, (and was “too lazy” to disassemble the cog unit). I made a wind chime from the gear parts I’d removed. I spraypainted the frame orange and drew stripe on it with a sharpie. This was the birth of Tygahbike.

In 2010, the bike was stolen before I had a chance to finish what I started. It was stuck in a limbo, forever halted. For years doing a double-take anytime I would see an orange bike, even when I moved back to the U.S.

Flash forward 14 years later to 2024 in St. Louis Missouri. In July I had visited home in Boston, and brought back a special oil painting I made during my first year in Berlin. It’s called Zwischenpfade, or “between-paths” and features two portraits of myself, one hiding behind a mask and the other made invisible through stripes. It includes my original bike in the bottom right corner, intersecting bike lanes, the U-bahn and a magpie whispering to a rabbit mocking me. The painting was about finding myself.

It was too big to take on the plane, so at the airport I had to rip off the canvas from the stretcher bars and roll it up, the same way I traveled with it across the Atlantic Ocean.

Seeing my favorite painting again and biking through St. Louis after my trip home inspired me to bring it back from the dead. “FINISH WHAT YOU STARTED” 2009-2024. The transformation of this bike to become exactly what I wanted it to be was my way of not settling, to invest in myself and to curate my own path forward that I want to lead. It was a conversation with my 23 year-old self.

The photos go backwards in time through the process.