who, what and why
The Origin Story
From the Block to the Beach.
American Beach. Virginia Key Beach Park. Highland Beach. Oak Bluffs. Atlantic Beach. Chicken Bone Beach. Bruce's Beach. Inkwell. Sag Harbor.
I started paperxpencil in 2018 because I kept noticing the same thing.
The beach was never just a beach for us. These weren't vacation spots. They were places we built when we were kept out of everywhere else. Sanctuaries. Proof.
PXP is a beach state of mind. Calm you have to claim. Peace that was fought for and then handed down freely. A coast that is both a collective refuge and a private place to breathe.
found, not made. that's the whole philosophy. we don't invent this. we recover it.
So I make things about it. Stories, garments, images. All of it comes back to the same coast, the one where we gathered and rested and made something ours when we weren't welcome anywhere else. PXP is part archive, part reflection. A way to keep what the shoreline knows.
The ocean was never just scenery to us. It's inheritance. It's where you go to be alone and where you go to be held. That's the whole thing I'm trying to hold onto.
PXP began far from the water, on the blocks of Brooklyn, where founder Jude Caze was raised before finding his practice years later, journaling near the beaches of South Florida and exploring the emotional atmosphere of coastal spaces. That migration, from block to beach, lives in everything PXP makes: garments built to be kept rather than cycled through, and visual works that hold the archive open; from historically Black shorelines to the coastal futures we imagine.
The shore remembers.
So do we.
Jude Caze, Fort Lauderdale
Founder, paperxpencil© Creative Design Lab
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