Noah Scalin’s studio is stuffed with toys, tapes, stickers, and skulls of all colors, shapes, and sizes. One of the little devils glowers at me during our interview, perched on a shelf behind the artist with its mouth frozen in a permanent, bleached-teeth grin. Noah doesn’t notice our uninvited guest; he’s too busy telling me about the Skull-A-Day series, a Webby Award-winning daily art project that went viral circa 2007, catapulting him from a career in commercial design to one in fine art, speaking, and consulting. By 2015, Noah’s business, Another Limited Rebellion, had evolved from a one-man socially conscious design firm into a creative consulting agency, thanks to his sister, who recognized a more robust business opportunity in his side gig.
“I was ready to get out of the design business anyway, as I was shifting my interests,” recalls Noah, who juggled freelance gigs in design and illustration for years before creative burnout kindled the Skull-A-Day project—and a major career change. “Fine art and consulting, that is the Venn diagram of my life now, and they overlap a fair amount. Some of the work I do is commissioned work for businesses, and then I do my fine art, but that fine art actually leads to insights that we turn into teachings for the business side of things.”
While the Skull-A-Day project is now old enough to vote, the philosophy behind the series remains a cornerstone of Noah’s consulting work. Initially designed to scoop the graphic designer out of a creative rut, the project—which encourages muscle memory and strengthens neuroplasticity through repetition and consistency—now serves as a guide for corporate teams, enabling them to adopt unconventional thinking and break free from autopilot mode.
In contrast, Noah’s personal practice reflects a much deeper exploration of the human experience within the chaos of consumer culture. His mixed-media works, painstakingly assembled from hundreds of stickers, layers of bright acrylic, and the odd vintage television set, evoke the 1980s and 90s—a time when pop culture and consumerism collided in a spectacular explosion of blockbuster sequels, video games, shopping malls, celebrity endorsements, and toy-driven franchises. Noah captures the “noise of American culture” in “Happy?”, a gasp-inducing trompe l’oeil painting that fingers McDonald’s as the not-so-secret curator behind Gen Xers’ toy collections. While many of these collectibles hold a special place in Noah’s heart, rooted in his childhood and still discoverable in his studio, they also strike a chord with younger audiences, who recognize cultural icons like Bart Simpson, Cookie Monster, and the Cabbage Patch Kids.
Noah reflects, “When you're younger, you share a communal language with others your age, and as you grow older, that evolves into a generational thing. It’s interesting that these memories remain relevant, especially from my era. I can talk about things I loved growing up, like Star Wars, and it turns out that everyone else still loves them too.”
Noah’s work appears in our July 2025 exhibition, Every Emotion All at Once. Visit the exhibition via the button below, then scroll through to read our interview with Noah Scalin.
In Today’s Q+Art Interview…
Noah Scalin discusses the lost art of making mixed tapes, reveals why his CD collection remains relevant in the streaming age, and explains Brian Eno’s hot take on AI: “Essentially a lying machine.”
What inspired you to choose skulls as a central theme in your artwork, and how has that influence shaped your identity as an artist over the years?
Noah Scalin: When I did the Skull A Day project, it was an idea that came to me as a whole: I should make a skull every day for a year. I liked skulls. I've got skull tattoos. When I was a kid, I liked archeology, and I liked pirates. It was something that was prevalent but somewhat subculture-oriented, even. I'm on the outskirts of many subcultures. I definitely have a goth leaning, but never one hundred percent identified with any of them. But I like the aesthetics for sure, so wearing black clothes and skulls has always been part of my life.
Of course, then you become the skull guy, and everyone thinks of you that way. It took many years for me not to be thought of that way because I was producing so much skull art, and then afterwards, I kept being asked to do it. I still produce it on occasion, but I shifted into portraiture to show I have other interests and I can do more things. I'm probably known more as the sticker guy than the skull guy now, but that's fine, too.
The stickers in your work really take me back. It's not just them—your entire work has this vibe reminiscent of the late 80s and early 90s.
NS: I buy modern stickers, but so much of our culture has now been churned over and over that I can still find tons of stuff that’s familiar to me that's also familiar currently to younger generations.
The fun part for me is discovering new stickers that aren't from my childhood but are still relevant today. When one of my videos goes live on TikTok, and people recognize a character, it’s great to know young folks can connect with it. My Little Pony is a perfect example; it has spanned so many generations that it remains relevant today, even though I grew up with it.
I love the cassette tapes and VHS in your work. Did you make mixed tapes growing up?
NS: My sister and I used to make them and send 'em back and forth. She's four and a half years younger than I am. In college, I would make mixtapes a lot in the '90s and send 'em to her. There's also a volunteer-run independent radio station in Richmond where we [recently] made a 90s-style mix tape on the air. We took turns putting on tracks from that decade or earlier, and it was so fun. We spent hours and hours and hours curating and taping and putting little funny things and making the covers.
You absolutely have to decorate the insert. That’s a given.
NS: That body of work, the cassettes and the VHS, was created between 2020 and now; essentially, all that work has been really influenced by a couple of factors. One was obviously the pandemic and being isolated, and the other piece is my mental health, which declined steeply during that time. I was processing a lot of what I was trying to deal with, depression and anxiety, through art. I started looking at all the objects in my studio because there’s tons of stuff everywhere.
I think people miss having something physical in their hands and truly owning it. There’s been a lot of talk recently about creeping techno-feudalism. Everything in the future will be rented, and at exorbitant prices.
NS: Which is the case now. Streaming your music, movies, TV shows, and then when that thing is gone, you don't know how to get it because you don't have it in any tangible form. I kept all my CDs, and I'm glad, because when I listen to streaming music, sometimes an album is just not there anymore.
I get why younger folks find it interesting. My sister, who's in New York, sent me a flyer for a tape media event she attended, where people were selling cassettes and VHS tapes. There’s definitely a nostalgia factor and a tangible quality to it. There's something about the imperfection of it all; that stuff is always going to look a bit janky.
How has your fascination with magic and magicians, particularly your experiences with performing and learning tricks, influenced the themes of illusion and spectacle in your work?
NS: I was obsessed with Houdini when I was a kid. And I learned magic, did magic tricks. I was the kid who would hang out at the Magic Shop, get taught new tricks, buy them, and hang out at the Magic Society. I was probably in middle school, and I would go and do kids' birthday parties, which was very stressful because I'm not, by my nature, a performer. When I do that stuff, I get nervous. It definitely was very hard for me to do the magic shows, but I loved magic. I love learning tricks and practicing.
What are your thoughts on the role of AI in creative work and its potential future?
NS: Brian Eno said the AI is essentially a lying machine, which I thought was hilarious and great. He also said people think there’s no work, but it’s actually a ton of work to craft the prompt and then to continue revising what you’re getting to what you want. So there’s a ton of work going in, but it’s not necessarily interesting or the kind of work that makes your brain better. It's also not something that's going to save you time for the same reason.
It has some useful applications, but it’s probably being used too much for a lot of things. I think it won’t take more than a year for people to realize that much of what looked good initially—the early stuff everyone was excited about—now looks terrible, and it’s so easy to spot what’s been created with it because it all looks the same. Its goal is to give you the most generic version of everything out there. It's not a creative thinking machine; it's just an aggregator.
What three pieces of media would you recommend to anyone wanting to understand your work better?
NS: PeeWee's Playhouse, specifically the TV series. I love the movie, but the TV series is its own thing, and it was based on something that he did as a comedy thing that was in LA, and it was sort of an underground comedy thing, and then it turned into a TV show.
A movie called Alice by Jan Švankmajer, a Czech animator. I love Alice in Wonderland, and I love how he interprets it. He makes stuff with animation, with everyday objects. I just loved that movie when it came out and have been obsessed with his work for a long time.
Then there's an album called Escape From Noise by the group Negativland, and I was a huge Negativland fan. I still am. They're a collage art, like sonic collage, collective, really clever, and ahead of their time. They would make music that was funny, but it could also be political or social commentary. That album was just mind-blowing when it came out. I think I love it because I love sampling; that's the audio version of collage.
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