Vinnie Hager

Vinnie Hager is a multidisciplinary artist born in 1996, based between Baltimore and Los Angeles. He earned his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021 and built his practice on dense networks of hand-drawn symbols: envelopes, eyes, peace signs, stars and arrows that he treats as a personal iconography, a kind of modern day hieroglyphics. His breakout came in 2021 with Letters, a collection of 1,000 hand-illustrated 1/1 works on Ethereum anchored by the envelope as a vessel for messages sent across distance; each piece is named after a moment or inside joke from his life, and the project went on to generate roughly ten million dollars in trading volume. From there Hager crossed freely between physical and digital work: murals, paintings and building facades on one side, and brand collaborations with Meta and Instagram (the sell-out Lollygagging drop in November 2022), Tommy Hilfiger (digital wearables for Metaverse Fashion Week in 2023), TIME and OpenSea on the other. In September 2023 he released Diary, an open edition that bridged both worlds by pairing the digital mint with 100 original physical drawings sent to collectors.

Hager draws obsessive, looping fields of repeated symbols in bold linework, spanning drawings, paintings, murals, mixed media surfaces and NFTs. His named projects include Letters (1,000 hand-drawn 1/1s, 2021), Lollygagging (Instagram drop, 2022) and Diary (open edition plus physical drawings, 2023). The work circles themes of identity, memory and connection, mimicking the density of online life.

• Letters, 1,000 hand-illustrated 1/1s on Ethereum (2021)
• Diary, open edition paired with 100 physical drawings (2023)
• Lollygagging drop with Instagram/Meta (2022)
• Tommy Hilfiger digital wearables for Metaverse Fashion Week (2023)
• Signature envelope and symbol iconography across murals and paintings

On the show