About the Artist
TINGZ is an award-winning artist, photographer, and creative director, internationally recognized for his album covers for Damian and Stephen Marley. The artwork for Damian Marley’s Grammy Award–winning album Stony Hill has become one of the most iconic reggae album covers of its era.
Beginning his career in commercial art and design, TINGZ has created posters, album covers, photography direction, and creative campaigns for major entertainment industry clients. His work spans decades of collaborations with MTV, NBC, CBS, SONY, and leading agencies across the music and entertainment industries.
His current Human Nature series extends this visual language into contemporary photography, using layered imagery, gestural abstraction, and mixed media to reconnect humanity with the natural world. Figures, organic forms, and atmospheric textures merge and dissolve, underscoring how our inner lives are inseparable from the environments we inhabit.
The work explores how identity is formed at the edge of nature and humanity, considering the conditions fundamentally intertwined with the environments we shape and are shaped by, and asking what it means to stay emotionally and spiritually alive in a rapidly changing world.
Artist Statement
My work reveals the delicate relationships and tension between humanity and nature, tracing how emotion, memory, and instinct persist beneath hyper‑mediated surfaces. In my ongoing Human Nature series, a live performance layered photographic composition with fragments and gestural abstraction collide, suggesting figures and landscapes that connect in an infinite number of ways. This ambiguity invites viewers to project their own narratives, revealing how nature and identity is continually constructed, edited, and remixed.
Through this process, the work becomes less about representation and more about energy, vulnerability, and resilience—what it means to be human now. I work across linen and panel with oil, acrylic, spray paint, digital imaging, C‑prints, wood, and fine art prints, often blending these media within a single piece to build dense, atmospheric surfaces.
Bio
TINGZ is a contemporary artist whose practice began in childhood with experimental abstract sculpture, earning him a State Gold Key Award and an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution as a teenager. He works across painting, photography, and digital image-making, developing a distinct visual language that merges popular culture, music, and technology.
After relocating to Los Angeles to study Multimedia Art, Tingz interned at Jim Henson Studios and then spent a decade as a creative director and digital artist for clients including MTV, NBC, CBS, and leading entertainment agencies. This LA-based industry experience anchors his transition into contemporary painting, where digital compositing, photographic processes, and painterly abstraction converge on the same surface.
His move into the Los Angeles gallery scene was marked by a solo exhibition at James Gray Gallery, followed by a sustained presence in galleries and art fairs across the West Coast and Miami, including Art Basel–adjacent programs and Miami Art Week presentations. Recent projects extend his visual language into music, most notably the Grammy Award–winning album cover for Damian Marley (2018), the Grammy-nominated album artwork for Third World’s 2020 release More Work to Be Done, his role as Creative Director for Damian Marley and Stephen Marley’s 2025 “Traffic Jam” tour, and Creative Director for Stephen Marley’s 2026 Spring Tour.
Tingz’s work has been featured in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and LA Weekly, and is held in private collections in the United States. He currently lives and works between Los Angeles and Miami, continuing to expand a practice that operates at the intersection of contemporary painting, photography, and digital culture.
Awards
2018 – Grammy Award, Album Cover, Damian Marley
2020 – Grammy Nominatied Album Cover, Third World, More Work to Be Done
Selected Exhibitions
2025 – Art Basel Miami Beach - Exhibitor
2024 – Miami Art Week, Miami - Exhibitor
2023 – Miami Art Week, Miami - Exhibitor
2022 – Art Basel Miami Beach - Exhibitor
2021 – Miami Art Week, Miami - Exhibitor
2019 – Art Basel Exhibition, Miami - Exhibitor
2017 – Art Basel Exhibition, Miami - Exhibitor
2017 – Red Dot, Wynwood / Art Miami, Miami
2016 – Red Dot, Miami Art Week, Miami
2015 – Wynwood, Miami Art Week, Miami
2014 – Art Basel Exhibition, Miami
2014 – Art-Life Residence, W Hotel, Summer, Miami
2014 – Downtown LA Art Walk, Solo Exhibition, Los Angeles
2012 – Solo Exhibition, James Gray Gallery, Los Angeles
2011 – Artist in Residence, Art-Life
1999 – Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
1998 – State Gold Key Art Award Exhibition
Group and Solo Exhibitions
Miami Art Week 2021
Art Basel Exhibition Miami 2019
Art Basel Exhibition Miami 2017
Wynwood, Art Miami, Red Dot 2017
Miami Art Week 2016 - Red Dot
Miami Art Week 2015 - Wynwood
Art Basel Exhibition 2014
W Hotel Art-Life Residence Summer 2014
Downtown LA Art-Walk Solo Exhibition Spring 2014
Solo Exhibition James Grey Gallery Los Angeles 2012
Art-Life - Artist in Residence 2011
Exhibited at Smithsonian Art Museum, 1999
Gold Key State Art Award, 1998