Assembly Line Artists

I just connected with Laurens Cui of Assembly Line Artists last week, artists formerly known as Full Tank, and was really interested in the amazing work that his group was putting out. Assembly Line Artists is a collective of 15 artist from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle, and they describe themselves as a "collaborative network of diverse artistic development, giving support, and empowerment amongst each artist". The group consists of graff writers, designers, illustrators, painters, and photographers.

Here's the history on how ALA began, written by Rens himself:

When I first moved to LA, my friend Brian and I used to hang out on my porch, get high, listen to music, and draw. It was wonderful, especially on rainy days when it was easier to elaborate on ideas, and mellow out to the mood of the environment and music. My porch became into a sanctuary for us, to the point where we drew so much, that we used to carry a binder around with our work.

One day, Brian had mentioned that we should put up our drawings online to showcase our work more out to the public. I agreed to the idea, and started working on transitioning everything into the web. During the process, I thought about all my friends who were also talented in the skill of art. I called everyone up and asked them if they wanted to form an online art club, which later, became a collective art crew, giving birth to FULL TANK.

We kept the name Full Tank till 2007, when we realized that everyone started symbolizing tanks in their art pieces, or anti-war semantics. Aside from those reasons, over the years, we split up and started developing individually. During the winter season of 2007, Mike Ruiz, Jerrod Veron, and I got together in San Francisco and decided to bring everyone back together. We decided to die out Full Tank, and start the new year with a new name. We came up with a few, but was skeptical about every concept we came up with. Then one night, we were getting high at Jerrod’s house, and Jerrod had an idea. He had mentioned Assembly Line, and the reason behind it, is that we’re so united as a group, that we can take each other’s art work, pass it down the line, and no matter what, it’ll be a sick final masterpiece product(sort of like pen pal painting but within the group). After that night, we gave birth to Assembly Line. Although I’ll admit, we hardly ever colab, I would say we’ve developed as a group so much more than when we were Full Tank.