The Blank Traveler

10/2/25

Interview conducted and published by LVL3

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

I’m a twenty five year old designer and artist currently living in NYC. I grew up in Cambridge, MA and went to school in Providence, RI.

How were you introduced to the mediums that you work with?

My parents started a T-shirt company back around the time I was born and started doing it full time pretty quickly. They printed t-shirts in our basement on three T-Jet DTG printers and still do to this day, except they moved to the ground level to accommodate a fourth printer. They’ve operated a few independently branded online e-sites over the past couple of decades—one being a custom merchandise company catered to mostly local businesses, another one being a graphic forward t-shirt brand focused mostly on vintage, public domain logos for now defunct companies, and a last one being a hyper-optimized online souvenir shop that hosts tees for every city and town in America. I worked as a very temporary part-time employee of theirs from 2015–2018, I think.

What kind of imagery are you drawn to?

Stuff that can stand alone without having to have any external knowledge and only gets better when you do learn more about it.

Your graphics feel easily recognizable as your own unique visual language. How did you come to develop this style?

I’m always thinking about how I can try to reflect the current as best I can, which means constantly reevaluating the stuff I make by asking myself questions like, “have I seen this before?” (if yes, then I amend) or “Is this an accurate reflection of me and my environment?”(if not, then I amend). Part of this is also learning all the new tools available. I try to be transparent about the tools I have at my disposal and try to lean into the allowances of said tools. These tools, funnily enough, have kind of worked hand-in-hand with my embrace of the digital; DTG printing is kind of the most immediate and explicit translation of a PNG graphic to cotton shirt.

What role does your environment or your surroundings play in your work?

I feel like my environment changes a very small amount every so often; I’ve lived in the northeast my whole life, from Cambridge to Providence to New York. In the grand scheme of things, the changes in environment between these places is pretty marginal but, particularly the switch from Cambridge to Providence, the nuances are palpable. Commuting between these two cities was always a strange exchange drenched with both an eerie and an uplifting kind of nostalgia which seemed to have laid the groundwork for this latest iteration of the brand.

Is there a moment you look back on as being formative to the work you do?

Early on in high school I figured out that money could buy one freedom, sometimes power, and, less frequently, respect. I also realized that my ability to print on t-shirts was something that was semi-in-demand by friends and classmates, and I realized that, with this, I could increase my status in the world by way of money, theoretically improving my freedom, power, and maybe respect. So, I would often market my printing and design services to my peers, who would occasionally commission me to make one-off shirts with their favorite sports players or musicians. Sometime during sophomore year, a sort-of-friend showed me a drawing he had done of a panda in a red triangle, telling me how he wanted me to print some shirts with this “logo” for his “brand”. This might’ve been the first time I had heard the word brand used in this context and I suddenly became brand-conscious. Soon I was seeing brands everywhere. Every shirt, somehow, was made by a brand. This epiphany was both traumatic and enlightening.

Why is the name of your brand, “The Blank Traveler”, regularly absent from the graphics printed on your garments?

Back during the brand’s inception, I actually used to plaster the name all over my shirts like all the other streetwear brands I saw. Part of the reason for selecting a three word name with a good amount of letters was so that I had a lot of text options to play around with; I could alternate between “blank” , “traveler”, and “the blank traveler” all together. This conceivably allowed for more flexibility in some of the text and image compositions I would come up with. So, practically speaking, the name was made for the sole purpose of putting on a garment. Over the years, however, I’ve grown apart from it. I think it takes a certain kind of naturally raw, unabashed artist (of which I am not) to have been doing something under the same name for a year shy of a decade and not be cringed out by it. However, as a sort of homage to its humble beginnings, I’ve challenged myself with the burden of operating under the same brand name even though there really is little to no connection between that name and what I make now. So, I don’t use it so much because of that. But, I will also say that I’ve also become sort of apathetic towards the process of naming a project and I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no sensible or cool way to go about it and that, because of that, it doesn’t really matter so much—the words themselves fuse to become symbols for the project’s images as opposed to meaning what they actually mean and we can all just reorganize the semantics of the words in this new context. Also, I’m just kind of weary of branding a graphic product with its brand name—it seems to be redundant if the brand is successfully representing the brand in formal/stylistic ways.

Can you introduce us to the Tbtraveler Diffusion Line? How did it begin, and how does it differ from the core project?

I guess, now that I think about it, it was in fact a sneaky, unsuccessful attempt to shift away from “The Blank Traveler” as a name. It didn’t work, of course. And because it didn’t work, I instead coopted this Tbtraveler Diffusion Line name to arbitrarily differentiate between projects, though it’s hard even now to figure out why certain things are under that umbrella and other things aren’t. I might also just have been inspired by the overly complicated bureaucracies of bigger companies who like to form all of these random sectors and agencies for whatever weird legal/logistical reasons.

Are there any travel experiences that are formative to your work?

Last summer, I went to the Philippines for the first time and they had a bunch of bizarre, completely novel clothing items I had never seen anywhere before. This seemed to be because of A.) different aesthetic and utilitarian values, B.) a different perspective on labor/craft, and C.) a rather unclear relationship with China regarding manufacturing and assembly. This inspired me on a few levels. Firstly, it was evidence that working in the sub-luxury, streetwear industry of America is inherently myopic and that pulling references from within itself is sterilizing. Secondly, it encouraged me to sew my own garments no matter how crudely executed. And thirdly, it was a reaffirmation to myself that I was in fact working in the right medium and that the world of non-runway, cheaply made garments could in fact be exciting.

What’s your studio or workspace like? Do you have any rituals when you settle in there?

I don’t really have a studio, aside from my room. When I’m doing digital work I can pretty much work wherever. When I’m working on physical things I need a desk and a chair.

How does your creative community now compare to your creative community when you were younger?

My current creative community is surprisingly disparate. The community at RISD was quick to fragment after graduation and it was hard to keep track of everybody’s whereabouts but, obviously, it was the community that really developed me as a capital- ‘A’-artist. Everyone there was making work at a relatively high level and improving at similar rates of speed, almost like a single entity. As you can imagine, being a part of that community was immensely motivating. That being said, I think I am equally inspired by my community pre-college—mostly my friends from high school who are doing things not in the arts, which spans all the other subjects: English, Math, Science, etc. I’m always keeping them in mind when making things which keeps me grounded.

How do you manage tending to the variety of responsibilities in the work you do? How do you mitigate burnout or exhaustion?

I only really do stuff for this when I want to, where I want to, and how I want to. Since it’s a project I genuinely enjoy doing, it really comes quite easily—both the thinking and the making. I try not to work on it when I don’t want to and I try to relieve it of all financial and creative burdens.