STAPLE

Ballard — The Staple Collection 

Skateboarding didn’t just show up one day. It erupted. Somewhere around the mid to late ’70s, when the urethane wheel met Independent Trucks, the streets of Southern California began to hum with the sound of freedom. In Ballard’s corner of the world — Rialto, California — it was less Dogtown glamour and more suburban grit. A nowhere town with one foot in Hollywood, one in the desert, and the rest lost somewhere between Big Bear and Barstow.

Born in 1963, Ballard came into a world of cracked sidewalks and hot asphalt. Across the street from the hospital where he was born, guitarist Randy Rhoads would later be buried — a grim kind of poetry for a kid who grew up with Ozzy on the radio and rebellion in his bloodstream. San Bernardino was the “big city,” and its streets became his first classroom in what would soon be called street skating.

His first deck was a Black Knight with clay wheels — crude, loud, alive. He’d push that thing to summer school, where art class meant clay under his nails and sketchbooks full of rough, honest attempts at expression. Around then, two 35mm cameras appeared in the house — one borrowed from the junior high, the other his mother’s for family vacations. The summer of 1977, he picked one up and turned the lens on the world he knew: neighborhood skaters, friends chasing pavement dreams, the early ghosts of what would become a culture.

Then came the Colton Skate Ranch. The Upland Pipeline. Those concrete playgrounds where gravity, danger, and style collided. That’s where it began — not the career, not the art show — but the seeing.

The Staple Collection (50 Decks) is the long echo of that beginning — a visual map of people and moments Ballard captured as life pulled him through skateboarding, travel, art, and connection. It’s not nostalgia. It’s evidence. Of a kid who followed curiosity, of a man who never stopped chasing what moves.

These boards, these images — they aren’t relics. They’re alive. And in 2026 and 2027, they’ll hang on gallery walls like open wounds and old friends, telling the story of a life spent in motion.