Artist Talks: Latashá On Art and Access.
Artist Talks is a space in which Palm NFT Studio explores the creative process, inspiration, and impact of some of the most intriguing people creating in the NFT space. Our goal is to reveal the person and the cultural context behind amazing work, with a focus on groundbreaking creators.
Listen to our Twitter Spaces AMA Series featuring Latashá, or read the full story below.
Palm NFT Studio welcomes Latashá, independent hip-hop & R&B artist based in LA, Community Manager at Zora Protocol, and one of the most successful Web 3 Music NFT artists of the 21st century.
Before she began selling NFTs, Latashá started her artistic journey studying hip-hop culture at Wesleyan University and eventually started opening concerts for artists like Kanye West and Q-Tip. She mostly relied on commercial work and sync licensing to make a living—writing songs for brands, and placing her music in ads, TV shows, and movies. In 2022, she’s creating a unique mark as a pioneer of the NFT music scene, a blossoming sector of the global non-fungible token ecosystem that has attracted a number of musicians, protocol incubators, and developers.
“The world didn’t have any form of platform [besides Instagram] for me to release anything on.” – Latashá
In early 2021, internet communities started to rapidly dive towards the NFT phase of the web (which is currently handing more power to creators), but many artists are still exploring the implications of an ecosystem that hasn’t reached its fullest capabilities in regards to diversity and inclusion. Around the same time, Latashá came across the phenomenon of non-fungible tokens and hasn’t looked back since. Beyond Latashá’s work as a cutting-edge hip-hop music artist, she also heads community development at the Zora Protocol, an Ethereum computing platform that functions as a decentralized, open-source, and distributed NFT-based system for users around the world.
Since her start, Latashá’s sales have amassed an average of well over $20,000 per 1/1 artwork with estimates ranging from $300,000 to nearly $1million in total sales across music NFTs & music video NFTs. Beyond sales, she’s adamantly teaching other artists, musicians, and curious community members about the use of NFTs and how they can be utilized to build new models of equity for digital artists across the globe.
“We know we can build our own. That’s why I think a lot of Black women are choosing to take up this space.”
Latashá is currently the Head of Community Programming at Zora while she also organizes free classes about the NFT ecosystem for artists, collectors, and curious bystanders. Latashá’s variety of events includes day-long events focused on the intersection of culture and Web3, usually with a focus on Black NFT creators. Alongside high Ethereum fees and other unobtainable barriers to entry in regards to technology, the process towards making Web3 art can often be inaccessible to marginalized groups around the world. Studios and networks are facilitating new ways to collect art, support creators, and get rewarded in the age of blockchain creativity, but this new medium still has plenty of room to become as flexible as it is creative.
Listen to the full Palm NFT Studio Twitter Spaces AMA Series featuring Latashá here.
