2021-12-06
1 小时 2 分钟Looking back on everything, I think the most promising or fulfilling or successful things happen from just an authentic place without some grand vision or some, like, grand aspiration of becoming something massive.
I just wanted to show my nephew that astronauts could be black.
And the only way I could do that was on a canvas.
So from the age of three, my guest today, Micah Johnson, he knew that he wanted to be a professional baseball player when he grew up.
And from that moment, he literally lived baseball 24/7 every moment of his waking hours.
And in 2012, as a young adult, his dreams came true when the Chicago White Sox drafted him.
But what Micah didn't know was that a truer calling in life was just getting started.
A couple years later, he was traded to the LA Dodgers, and Micah, almost on a lark, discovered painting something that had never been any part of his life.
Art was just not a part of his world.
He was all baseball all the time, but something about it, it called to him in a way he never saw coming.
And now, while his full time job was pro baseball, drawing and painting and creating art, it became a new, increasingly consuming passion.
But it was a single moment when his young nephew came to him and asked him whether black people could be astronauts.
That changed everything.
In response, Micah painted this moving depiction of a young, confident black boy in an oversized astronaut helmet, ready for adventure, as a way to not just answer yes, but create a powerful visual depiction of courage and possibility.
At around the same time, Micah was feeling called to bring his baseball career to a close and go all in on this new passion around art.
But no longer a novelty as a pro athlete slash painter, he found his art hard to sell.
He was really struggling until everything came together when that character he'd painted for his neck met this emerging world of NFTs, crypto art, web three, and the power of digital aspirational movements.
And he turned that painting into a character named Anku that then began to build a world and a community and an enterprise and a movement around it.
And Micah's work has centered now around empowering young african american kids to see the possible and dream without limitations.
Micah began releasing nfts in January of 2020.