Like the noble art of skateboarding, the upcoming Leave It On the Board show is part exhibition, part competition. 

Twelve D.C.-area artists will vie for cash prizes by presenting their latest creations on a novel medium: the surface of a skateboard. The artist behind the best board will take home $1,000; another $1,000 goes to the best triptych installation (a foldable, three-paneled painting; the “panels” in this case will, naturally, be skateboards). Runners-up receive prizes too.

The event will also feature six noncompeting guest artists displaying their own art and photography. Honfleur Gallery, a 1,700-square-foot contemporary art exhibition space in Anacostia, is hosting. Officially, Leave It On the Board is being put on by the ARCH Development Corporation (a group dedicated to promoting local art in Anacostia), which has run the gallery since it opened in 2007.

The roster of 12 competing artists includes Austin Morris, a former Marine Corps data specialist who owns a fashion design and visual arts company; Cooper Joslin, a poet, journalist, and certified full-stack developer who moonlights as an artist; as well as Keiona Clark and Karla Rodas, two local working creatives crusading against the “starving artist” archetype. 

Local artist Elijah Prince found out about the competition through the gallery’s social media in April and entered, thinking it would be a good opportunity to meet other creatives from the area. Prince dabbled in skateboarding when he was younger, but is, in his own words, “not very good.” Still, he loves skate culture, and believes its ethos overlaps with the way he approaches art.

“Skateboarding is about uninhibited expression and dauntless freedom,” Prince tells City Paper. “I wanted to combine these ideals in a way that felt both open and powerful.”

Judges reviewed more than 200 submission before shaving the finalists down to the elite 12. Prince made the cut. 

“The competition was so fierce,” says Leave It On the Board curator Luis Del Valle. 

A giant in the D.C. art scene, Del Valle is known for his portraits of civil rights heroes—including Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Ida B. Wells—which evoke the same sense of reverence as his portraits of Catholic saints. Many of Del Valle’s paintings manage to look simultaneously like something decorating the wall of a trendy restaurant or an altar. His murals can be found across the DMV.

Del Valle began his formal development as an artist by studying Renaissance portraiture, but he soon came to incorporate influences from subversives like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. 

A local for decades, Del Valle and his family arrived in D.C.and settled in Columbia Heights in 1985, after fleeing the Nicaraguan Contra War, enduring a monthslong journey to the U.S. border and surviving a stint in a Texas refugee camp. Unfortunately, they arrived just in time to witness the city’s crack epidemic. It was amid this chaotic environment that Del Valle started cultivating a love of tagging and graffiti, which steadily evolved into a broader love of art. 

Although he faced his share of difficulties growing up, Del Valle doesn’t self-mythologize. Instead, he sees the civil rights icons that feature heavily in his artwork as heroes who endured hardships he can hardly imagine. 

“When we hear leaders today complaining about how bad it is, I love to point out how the people who came before us had it so much worse,” says Del Valle. “Starting even with Frederick Douglass.” 

In 2019, Del Valle put on Out of Chaos, which paid tribute to the graffiti style that inspired him as a young artist. The exhibit featured his handiwork adorning street signs; today it seems Out of Chaos shares a bit of its creative DNA with Leave It On the Board. In both shows, Del Valle embraces less common mediums as alternatives to the more traditional canvas. 

More recently, in 2022, Del Valle curated a showcase of Latine creatives called Love, Hope, & Art: Woven Thread. Del Valle sees his art-making and curation as being in-conversation with each other rather than as separate vocations. He frequently displays his own art at shows he curates. (And he curates quite a few shows: He’s currently working on four, including Leave It On the Board.) “Mother of Darkness,” one of his most iconic portraits, featuring a woman in Dia de los Muertos-style makeup wearing a crown of colorful feathers and flowers, was on display at Love, Hope & Art. 

Del Valle has an endearing bias toward locally oriented art. For several years in the late 2000s, he did curation for the Saint John Paul II National Shrine, where he worked with pieces from the Catholic Church in Europe: It only made him more proud of his D.C. roots. “When I saw the quality of the collection that we had on loan from the Vatican … it showed me that local artists are creating just-as-good of works of art,” he recalls.

And although he has murals on display at Naval Criminal Investigative Service headquarters and at the Italian Consulate, ask him his favorite pieces and he’s quick to talk about work he’s done for local schools. Specifically: his mural of Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison at Garrison Elementary School, his mural of a march in Mount Pleasant at Bancroft Elementary, and his mural of civil rights and labor icons at Cardozo Educational Center. 

Although he lives in Anacostia, Del Valle stays connected to Columbia Heights by teaching classes and workshops at the Latin American Youth Center. The neighborhood has changed significantly since he lived there, and though the artist sees much of the change as for the better (he says there are far fewer drugs and gangs), he worries the locals and business owners who laid the foundation for the neighborhood’s success might be left behind as rents continue to climb. “I just want them to have the opportunity to enjoy the changes,” Del Valle says.

Growing up, Del Valle was never particularly interested in skateboarding. But he’s always loved the graffiti and tags associated with skate parks, and the way this art bridges the gap between skater and graffiti cultures. 

Skate parks themselves also make for unique canvases. 

“You have the loops, you have these curves,” says Del Valle. “And when you apply graffiti to those types of structures or those ramps, it really gives the graffiti an extra dimension.” 

It was Duane Gautier, Honfleur Gallery’s founder, who started the conversation about an exhibition on skateboard art. After seeing a show featuring board art at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, last November, Gautier reached out to Del Valle about doing something similar in the District. 

“I was blown away by the idea that we could merge fine arts and skateboarding, in such a way that not only [opened] up what skateboarding culture is about to the culture that is involved in it, but also … to a fine arts audience,” says Del Valle. 

Bridging gaps is a recurring theme in Del Valle’s work and life. Murals of civil rights icons bridge gaps between a hard past and a hopeful future. Graffiti on road signs and skateboards bridges gaps between the street-level creativity of D.C. and so-called fine art.

As Del Valle concludes: “The most effective way to change the world is to learn about each other.” 

Leave It On the Board opens on Aug. 19 with a reception from 7 to 9 p.m. and runs through Sept. 16 at Honfleur Gallery. honfleurgallerydc.com. Like executing a wicked grind at the Shaw skate park or tagging the side of the Columbia Heights Target, it’s totally free.