ALEX KNOST OPENS A SOLO SHOW AT ADLER SMITH GALLERY

Alex Knost's solo show opened Saturday, August 29, at Adler Smith Gallery in Santa Monica, and it will hang there for 37 days, closing October 5. The photographer and filmer behind the announcement, credited only as insta grant, shot the piece for Vans, the brand that has quietly built one of surfing's stranger creative careers around Knost for two decades. This is not a shoe drop dressed up as culture coverage. It is a surfer's gallery wall, and Vans is the only reason most people outside Santa Monica will hear about it.

Alex Knost Has Been Vans Family Since 2006

Knost joined Vans as a surf team rider in 2006 and stayed attached to the brand long enough that by August 2020 the company folded him into its global apparel program, a tier usually reserved for athletes the brand wants dressing its entire line, not just wearing its shoes in contest footage. Vans later built him a collection inspired by his own Coupe de Ville Cadillac, the kind of personal reference point a brand only greenlights for someone it trusts with more than a logo placement. Vans has spent 2026 pairing its team riders with equally specific personal references, the same instinct that turned a Chanel handbag into an Old Skool colorway this month. Twenty years is a long sponsorship in a sport that turns riders over fast, and Knost spent most of it doing things that had nothing to do with competitive surfing.

Adler Smith Turns Skate History Into Wall Space

Adler Smith Gallery in Santa Monica has built its identity around exactly this kind of crossover, showing work that treats skate and surf history as a legitimate visual art lineage rather than a marketing footnote. Handing Knost a solo show fits a gallery that already blends California's board culture with a program built for people who take painting and photography as seriously as they take wave selection. It is a small gallery making a specific bet, that the audience for Knost's surfing is the same audience that will show up for his canvases. Santa Monica puts that bet a short drive from the same Pacific water Knost has spent two decades photographed in, so the gallery is not importing his subject matter from somewhere else. It is hanging the work a few blocks from the source material.

Thirty Seven Days on One Wall

The show runs from August 29 to October 5, thirty seven days on a single Santa Monica address before it comes down. That is a tighter window than most solo exhibitions get, which puts real pressure on foot traffic in the first two weekends. A gallery run measured in weeks rather than a full season fits a program built around a working surfer's calendar more than a career artist's.

Tomorrows Tulips Started When Knost Needed a Break

Painting is not even Knost's first side door out of surfing. He formed the lo fi pop band Tomorrows Tulips in 2010 after stepping away from his earlier group Japanese Motors, building a sound closer to Pavement and the American underground of the nineteen nineties than anything in a surf video soundtrack. In 2016 he debuted Glitterbust, an experimental electric guitar duo with Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, and he scored a 2019 film called Tan Madonna with music co written alongside fellow surfer Lee Ann Curren. He also founded his own surfboard label, Brown Microwave Television, in 2012, building boards around outdated or discarded shapes other manufacturers had already moved past. A surfer with two bands, a Sonic Youth collaborator and a board label is not an unusual profile for Knost specifically, it is close to his baseline, and the Adler Smith show is simply the visual art version of a pattern he has already run in music and board building.

Knost Joins a List Vans Has Been Building All Year

Vans is not the only board sport brand pushing its athletes toward gallery walls and runway credits this year. Y-3 put skateboarder Mark Gonzales in a bomber jacket painted by graffiti artist Chito for its Paris runway in January, and Vans itself gave Cocona Hiraki's own hand drawn artwork a molded outsole on a signature shoe in July. Knost's show adds a third data point to the same trend line, athletes whose sponsors now sell the art alongside the athletics rather than choosing one. The gallery wall closes October 5. The sponsorship, on current form, does not look like it is going anywhere.