From Cornfields to Conscious Lines: Gabe Weis's Artistic Destiny

By @JustinWetch

"Like eleven, twelve years old. You're wildly young. Getting on a bus at 6 in the morning, taken out to some field, all day getting yelled at to work faster."

Paper cuts from corn stalks. Sweat in the wounds. Can't slow down. This is detasseling in the Midwest, technically illegal child labor that everyone does anyway. Gabe Weis did it for the money to buy what his parents couldn't afford: Starter jerseys instead of Kohl's sale rack.

Later, he'd trade a kid for a Jerry Rice rookie card, and when the father called to complain, Gabe's dad asked one question: "Did they make the trade fair and square?" They had. Case closed.

That combination of brutal work ethic meets sharp trades would carry Gabe from cornfields to Venice Biennale, from union meetings to zero gravity. But first, he'd have to learn the difference between what you're supposed to want and what you actually need.

"I was kind of like an all-American kid,"

Gabe tells me. Student body president. Captain of the football team. Good grades. Clean cut. The works.

But State Farm headquarters loomed over his Illinois town like a beige prophecy. Everyone's ambition: land a good insurance job, buy a McMansion, stay forever. Gabe was having none of it.

"I was literally always like, 'How do I get out of this town?'"

The escape plan was meticulous. Get good grades. Get into a good college. Get out. He chose sociology at Wisconsin-Madison, "history adjacent," he explains, but more practical. You could learn how societies function and "maybe figure out things to fix."

Art wasn't part of the plan. Sure, he'd been drawing since third grade when his grandmother taught him. Sure, he couldn't stop. "Give me a Sharpie and anything, I'll draw on it." But being a full-time artist? "Wasn't on the list of things that could happen in my life."

After college, Gabe wasn't ready to adult. He backpacked Europe on $6,000 for eight months, sleeping in hostels, living on bread and cheese. Then one wild weekend in East London changed everything. "I lost all my dopamine," he says. The party haze cleared to reveal crushing guilt, Catholic guilt, he calls it. There was an election coming.

 "If I don't try to defeat George Bush, I'm gonna always regret that I was out here partying while my country was going to shit."

He flew home with $600 to his name. A friend had a free room in San Diego. Another friend was driving to California. The universe conspired. He landed a job on the Kerry campaign, where he met his future wife. They spent two unemployed months together after the election, "putting our relationship in a time machine."

California stuck. He followed his wife to the Bay Area, got a union job representing state workers. For twelve years, he was a political operative who happened to draw. Every meeting, he'd sketch. Started giving them away, soon every office had a Gabe Weis original. But these were gifts, not sales. Meditation, not career.

Gabe's signature motif emerged from his own split: figures with two overlapping profiles, representing his divided self in a way. "I felt guilty making art 'cause I thought my time was better spent in politics," he explains. One face for the activist, one for the artist, neither fully him.

By his early thirties, the division was killing him. Good job, house, marriage, everything on paper perfect. "I felt like I was sleepwalking through life." His wife's friend mentioned ayahuasca. Something about changing perspective. Gabe was desperate enough to try.

"I had the clearest vision ever of becoming a famous artist."

January 2021. Gabe reads about @Micah_Johnson3 selling a million dollars of crypto art. His neighbor had tried to convince him about Bitcoin when it was $100. Gabe had dismissed it: "The government will never allow this." He'd missed that boat. This time would be different.

"Next time I hear something crazy, instead of shitting on it, I'm gonna explore it."

Then came Clubhouse. Those early 2021 NFT rooms were electric.

"To this day, I've never had anything that got me so on fire," Gabe says. "I barely needed to sleep. It was like being high on NFT meth."

By September, Bright Moments gallery gave him a show in LA. They called it Gabapalooza. The cops shut down the pre-party. The gallery overflowed front and back. "Probably the most people ever at an NFT solo show," Gabe estimates. He made more that night than his annual salary.

Sitting in a hotel room after Gabapalooza, quarantining from his family, Gabe paced with tears in his eyes. He'd made a million dollars from NFTs. He was eighteen months from a pension. "Entrepreneurs are people with rich parents," he'd always believed. That wasn't him. He was the government cheese kid, the one who couldn't let that happen to his own children.

But the love he'd received at that show, the validation. "All right," he decided, "time to lock in and just do art."

His bosses weren't surprised. They'd seen the photos with Paris Hilton at Bitcoin Miami. They knew about the ETH. "Go get 'em," they said.

But the Stoics launched into a nightmare. ETH crashed from $4,000 to $1,100. Two weeks later, royalties were eliminated. Two weeks after that, FTX collapsed. Hackers targeted Stoics holders as some of the only active traders left, stealing hundreds.

 "Every time I'd do something cool for the community, it almost didn't matter. Someone would lose 20 Stoics and the floor would drop again."

Gabe was bitter. This was "the opposite of a cash grab," yet it crashed anyway. He needed to pursue something that would pay the bills. "I was kind of the last chopper out of 'Nam," Gabe reflects. One of the last big PFPs built on a model that died overnight.

The failure taught him something crucial: "Happiness has to come from within. If you're basing it on what other people think of you or a floor price... that's a recipe for supreme unhappiness." He'd done everything right, curated the perfect community, and it didn't matter. "No crying in the casino," as he puts it. You can't control how people receive your gift.

These days, Gabe's integrated. No more Two Faces, no more split identity. The practical Midwesterner and the mystical artist merged into something new. He still draws constantly, that compulsion never left. But now he knows what it's for.

"The goal of the work and everything I do as a human is trying to create deeper connections with people."

He's back to what always worked: showing up at events, drawing portraits, giving more art away than he sells. Each sketch is a trade, fair and square: his compulsion for their connection. Someone from Facebook told him that having art in someone's bedroom would be worth thousands in advertising dollars. Gabe thinks longer-term:

"If they see your art every day for 10 years, then they come into money, the chances of them buying paintings go way up."

From detasseling corn to painting in zero gravity. From approaching a union pension to showing at Venice Biennale. The government cheese kid made it to Paris Hilton's birthday party. But success isn't the money or the fame. It's that he doesn't need permission anymore.

When you give Gabe Weis a Sharpie and anything, he'll draw on it. Always has. The only difference now is he knows that compulsion is destiny, not distraction.

When I ask about collectors who have believed in him recently. He shouts out @batsoupyum who is "absurdly down-to-earth," @JonathanLittle who has "been a big supporter for years," and Gavin Meeler who collected at "his height of popularity." But the deepest gratitude goes to @ArtOnBlockchain: "I think he's the patron saint of NFTs. He bought a ton of Anti-Stoics... very down-to-earth, very humble, a very good representative for Web3."

When it comes to artists who inspire him, Gabe points to @Gavinmeeler because "he's not playing with fear," @Coldie's pure consistency since she "came when you could buy an XCOPY for $10, still here," and @amadon's willingness to speak up because "he seems to give zero fucks."

For future episodes of the Weekly Dose of ART, @GabrielJWeis recommends @hafftka who is "71 and been doing it a long time," @JimenaBuenaVida who is "the nicest, sweetest person ever," and @rebeccarosenft because "she has her own lane and no one else could do what she does."