I always tell people: Do something out of your love and your passion, and the world’s gonna come to you. That’s been true for me, and it’s true for Shaheed Rucker.
Shaheed Rucker grew up in Mount Airy in the 90s — a place and time I call “Black Utopia.” He says his childhood was a “holistic Philly experience,” visiting his great-grandmother in North but living in Northwest, with neighbors on their porches and in their manicured gardens, the girls with the natural hair, playing Double Dutch. That’s where he got the spark to become the artist, curator and visual brand strategist he is today.
You might know Rucker from his creation and curation of the hot Vintage Design Market in the old stables of the Crane Arts Building (and featured in this month’s Philly mag). Maybe you’ve seen his work in the auditorium of the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Or the exhibition of his collages currently on view at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh.
Way back, he spent his youth roaming free on playgrounds, playing sports “sun up to sundown,” he says. He attended Bethune-Cookman HBCU in Daytona Beach, FL, then headed back to Philly, where he got his start designing posters for free, 600-plus-person cookouts in his old neighborhood.
“My creative journey was molding and designing the flyers for those events,” he says. A friend helped him learn Photoshop to collage photos from Ebony, Essence and especially Jet, the magazines he loved — for ads that didn’t just invite everyone to a party; they were works of art of themselves.
The reactions he got to these first creations made Shaheed realize that 1. They worked, and 2. Young people didn’t know about magazines that were foundational to the culture. He felt pulled, he says, to use his art, “to bridge the gap between the youth and that vintage design.” Inspired by iconic collage artist Romare Bearden, he also made art that doubled as authentic branding, marketing and interior design elements.
For two years Shaheed lived in Atlanta and created work he called “Jet Reimagined” for restaurants. When he came back to Philly, he got into something else: Turning the vacant Crane Arts stables into a pop-up market where his “vintage friends” could vend their vintage furnishings, clothing, design, and jewelry, first for the holidays, then, when it caught on, year-round. (I’ve sold some of my personal collection there.) He also took a call from his friend Mike Wilson, a curator at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, who wanted to “brighten up” the artless auditorium there, and installed work in that space.
Shaheed is driven to create, and inspired by his connections. “Whenever I see the opportunity to highlight other people, from the city or just my friends, I’m gonna do that,” he says.
Last year, when the NFL Draft was in Pittsburgh, he got the idea to feature the story about me in Time magazine in 2003, along with jerseys from my collection, from when I made Mitchell & Ness a global brand. That idea of Shaheed’s is a work in progress. But it’s also a labor of love.
West Philly born and raised with a slosh of Brooklyn, Big Rube partnered with Mitchell & Ness in 2000 to help make it a global brand marketing and selling high-end throwback jerseys. He has been photographing Philly since 2009, including in a Daily News Column from 2011 to 2017. He’s also a chef, preparing to open his own space in 2026.
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