FAISAL ABDU'ALLAH TAUGHT ABLOH AIR TO SCREEN PRINT

Faisal Abdu'Allah got ABLOH AIR Flight 002 hands on with screen printing at UW Madison. He's a London barber, a UW Madison printmaking professor, and the man who turned Virgil Abloh's 2015 Red Shirt into a signed print edition.

That's what makes this stop more than a campus tour. The Virgil Abloh Foundation didn't just take its eight Chicago students to the school on Abloh's diploma. It put them at the screens with the teacher who printed an edition Abloh signed.

The cohort spent Wednesday at UW Madison, Abloh's alma mater. They explored the campus, met near peer mentors, and ended up at August, a streetwear shop on State Street.

Faisal Abdu'Allah Printed the Off Wisconsin Run

The story starts with a fundraiser. In 2015 the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association asked Abloh, a civil engineering graduate of the school, to design a limited edition of the Red Shirt, the school's yearly scholarship tee. He called it Off Wisconsin, a nod to Off White, and its proceeds started an Off Scholarship for incoming freshmen with financial need.

Abdu'Allah heard about the designs and had an idea.

Turn them into screen prints.

He worked with a student, Aaron David, to pull sample prints and show them to Abloh, according to UW Madison's account of the project. Abloh liked them, the full edition ran with student volunteers, and he came in and signed each print himself.

Those sheets came back into view this summer. Four signed Off Wisconsin prints went into Sotheby's Contemporary Discoveries sale, which ran through July 14, 2026, with all proceeds going to the new Virgil Abloh Scholarship Fund at UW Madison. The Foundation, led by Shannon Abloh, partnered with Sotheby's directly.

Screen printing is a good place to start. It's cheap, it's fast, and the tools look a lot like the ones in any T shirt shop.

A Barber From Harlesden Holds the Chair in Art

Abdu'Allah isn't a typical printmaking professor. He was born in London in 1969, trained at the Royal College of Art, and still cuts hair at his own barbershop and studio in Harlesden, in northwest London. His Live Salon performances, which turn a working haircut into an artwork, have run since 2006.

At UW Madison he's a Professor of Printmaking and holds the Chazen Family Distinguished Chair in Art, which the university gave him in 2021. His sculpture Blu³eprint, a seated self portrait in a barber's chair, sits outside the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art at State and Henry streets. He has called it a counter monument to the Lincoln statue on Bascom Hill.

That résumé fits the program better than any fashion credit could. ABLOH AIR is built for 17 and 18 year olds from Chicago neighborhoods that don't usually get a door into creative work. A teacher who still runs a barbershop while holding an endowed chair is a working answer to a question plenty of creative kids ask, which is whether you have to pick one life.

Abloh never picked one either. He studied engineering in Madison, DJed, and ran Louis Vuitton menswear from 2018 until his death in November 2021.

August Brought Streetwear Back Into the Day

The last stop was August, a streetwear and sneaker shop on the 400 block of State Street. Owner Rob Bowhan is a UW Madison graduate who worked for Puma and Under Armour before coming home to open his own store, and he named it after the month his son was born.

The shop has a print story of its own. Bowhan has worked with UW design students before, challenging them to make one color screen printed shirts for the store. For a cohort that had just been at the screens, that's the next step made visible, a print going from a studio table to a rack people pay for.

It also closes a loop the Foundation has been drawing all year. Flight 002 was named on October 12 with eight students, six nonprofit partners and eight institutional partners behind them, and the pilot cohort before it went to London and Paris for nine days. The program's Creator Series has brought in a run of working creatives since October 21.

The near peer mentors were the quiet piece of the day. They're only a few years further along than the cohort, close enough to show what the next step looks like.

Abdu'Allah has been that next step before. The student who pulled the first Off Wisconsin samples with him in 2015, Aaron David, was an undergraduate when Abloh came in to sign the run, and the edition they made together now pays scholarships at the school Flight 002 just toured.