Sam Spratt — Biography

A decade of serving other people's stories taught me how to tell one of my own. Trained in oil painting and illustration at the Savannah College of Art and Design (graduated 2010), I spent the following years making editorial illustration, portraiture, album artwork for Kid Cudi, Logic, Janelle Monáe, and Childish Gambino, thousands of paintings for Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2, and covers for Marvel, Netflix, Searchlight, and Rolling Stone.

LUCI was born from a breaking point — a period of rupture through unforced error. A series of interconnected digital paintings paired with written psalms, named after our ancestor who fell from a tree a few million years ago in Afar, Ethiopia. Part confession, part guidebook, part joke at my own expense: Luci is light. What began as a singular story has grown into a shared one — observing, predicting, and mirroring my life and the lives of those around it.

Brushwork branched into code, communal rituals, interactive systems, and node-based generative structures that put participants with and against each other. The seeds planted in the Skulls, grown through the Players, and spread through the Masks gave digital artworks a varnish not of resin but of people: a father's message for his children, an ultrasound of an unborn child, cryptographic puzzles, criticisms, songs, jokes, poems, love letters, confessions, vandalism, apologies. Their words are embedded in the artwork; the artwork was made from their words.

The Masquerade and the entire collection of Masks were most recently exhibited at the Toledo Museum of Art. The complete works of Luci appeared in Venice during the 60th Biennale for a first solo exhibition. Chapter 7 of Luci and the next exhibition are under way.

Sam Spratt lives and works in New York City.

The Story of Luci · Exhibitions · About This Universe · Pre-LUCI archive