The Hipstory Series is not only the work of artist and illustrator Amit Shimoni, but also the exact place where hipster culture meets history. Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong, Mahatma Gandhi: all transformed into hipsters by Tel Aviv-based artist Amit Shimoni. The graduate project out of the Visual Communications Department at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem presents a series of portraits of world leaders transformed into hipsters, a project that started when Amit got an assignment that urged him to compare past and present leaders’ vision.
From Graduate Project to Global Brand
What started as eight leaders has grown into a collection of over 70 characters. The roster now spans politicians (Obama, Trump, Thatcher, Merkel, Kim Jong Un), artists (Picasso, Dali, Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Warhol), scientists (Einstein, Tesla, Marie Curie), civil rights icons (MLK, Rosa Parks, RBG), and pop culture figures (Muhammad Ali, Steve Jobs, Princess Diana).
Shimoni made the Forbes Israel 30 Under 30 list in 2015. His illustrations have been commissioned by the New York Times, the Norwegian Prime Minister’s office, and the Danish Parliament. In 2018, Mexico’s #GoVote campaign used his portraits of five presidential candidates on t-shirts that went viral across Mexican social media. That same year, he created a custom 3D Android mascot for Google Campus Tel Aviv.
In 2017, Laurence King Publishing released Hipstory: Why Be a World Leader When You Could Be a Hipster?, a postcard set with text by Stephen Ellcock. In 2021, he launched a women-focused series for International Women’s Day featuring Kamala Harris, Oprah, Greta Thunberg, and Queen Elizabeth II, partnering with Meena Harris’s Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign.
House of Legends and Beyond
In 2022, Shimoni served as art director for House of Legends, an NFT collection of 9,993 pieces. Thirty super-rare NFTs were launched to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s Ax-1 mission with Israeli astronaut Eytan Stibbe, making it one of the first NFT collections exhibited in space. Proceeds funded clean water wells in sub-Saharan Africa and India.
Prints and merchandise are available at hipstoryart.com, with editions also carried by iCanvas, Society6, and the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History store in Philadelphia. Shimoni continues to work from his studio in Old Jaffa, Tel Aviv.
For more illustrated portraits reimagined through a different lens, see Renaissance Portraits by Christian Tagliavini and Illustrations for Rolling Stone by Evgeny Parfenov.
