Artist Statement

I make work for people who understand that culture is not decoration. It is infrastructure. My art moves between digital mythmaking, public-facing community work, collectible experiments, and character-driven visual worlds that look playful until they start asking harder questions.

This page gathers the threads of my art practice: Crypto Ouroboros, I Don't Care Bears, public art and exhibition work, and the community arts leadership that shapes how I build proposals, partnerships, and experiences.

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Loops, Systems, Signals

My work is built around loops: attention loops, economic loops, emotional loops, mythic loops, and the loops we pretend we are above while refreshing the same feed for the tenth time. I use bright surfaces, absurdist characters, digital artifacts, and public-space storytelling to make work that is accessible at first contact and stranger the longer you sit with it.

Crypto Ouroboros explores cycles of creation, speculation, desire, collapse, and renewal inside digital culture. I Don't Care Bears uses sweetness as camouflage. The bears are cute, sure. They also carry exhaustion, humor, defiance, and the tiny private rebellions people use to survive systems that keep asking them to smile.

Across physical murals, festival work, NFTs, and community arts projects, I am interested in art that behaves like a signal. It should attract people, give them a way in, and then leave them with something sharper than a pretty surface.

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Crypto Ouroboros

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Crypto Ouroboros is a digital art project about recurrence: the endless appetite of systems that consume themselves and call it growth. The work uses circular motion, symbolic density, and animated transformation to speak to blockchain culture without flattening it into hype wallpaper.

The original Ouroboros NFT drop sold out in 45 minutes and moved 4 ETH in total volume. That matters because it shows more than technical fluency. It shows that the work found an audience willing to act quickly, collect seriously, and participate in the world the project opened.

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I Don't Care Bears

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I Don't Care Bears is a character-based visual world built around tenderness with teeth. The series borrows the language of comfort, mascots, stickers, cartoons, and collectible culture, then bends it toward burnout, boundaries, social performance, and comic refusal.

The project works because it does not ask viewers to choose between charm and critique. It lets them laugh first, then quietly realizes they have been understood. Rude, but useful.

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Selected Exhibits, Public Work, and Cultural Projects

• High Ground Festival: exhibited work in a festival context, connecting visual art with a wider cultural and experiential audience.

• NoBo Art District mural: public-facing mural work rooted in Boulder creative culture and neighborhood visibility.

• Crypto Ouroboros NFT drop: sold out in 45 minutes, with total volume moved of 4 ETH.

• I Don't Care Bears: an ongoing character-driven art universe spanning digital collectibles, illustration, and visual storytelling.

• NoBo Art District role: community arts work that adds operational, curatorial, promotional, and civic context to my practice. I do not just make the thing. I understand the room the thing has to live in.
   

Why This Work Fits Proposals, Public Art, and Partnerships

I bring more than an object. I bring a working understanding of audience, public context, storytelling, visibility, and follow-through. That matters for committees, districts, brands, festivals, and grant panels because the strongest art proposals are not only imaginative. They are executable.

• Public engagement: work with immediate visual accessibility and deeper conceptual layers for repeat attention.

• Digital fluency: proven ability to build and sell native digital work without treating technology as a gimmick.

• Community credibility: active arts-district experience and comfort working inside civic, cultural, and neighborhood ecosystems.

• Proposal strength: strategic messaging, audience thinking, production awareness, and the ability to explain why the work belongs in a specific place.

• Range: murals, digital art, NFTs, character systems, festival contexts, and community-facing creative infrastructure. Apparently I contain multitudes. Annoying, but marketable.
   

For Curators, Committees, and Collaborators

I am interested in proposals, exhibits, public art opportunities, commissioned projects, cultural partnerships, and creative experiments that benefit from work with visual heat, conceptual structure, and a real relationship to audience. My best projects sit where art, story, place, and participation start making eyes at each other across the room.

If you are reviewing this for a proposal, the short version is this: I can make distinctive work, explain why it matters, understand the public it serves, and carry the project from idea to visible outcome. That combination is rarer than it should be, but here we are.

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Project Snapshot

• Primary artist: Collie Christenbury

• Practice areas: digital art, animation, AR, character worlds, public art, murals, creative strategy, community arts

• Key works: Crypto Ouroboros and I Don't Care Bears

• Notable NFT result: sold out in 45 minutes, 4 ETH total volume moved

• Community context: Boulder-area creative work and NoBo Art District involvement

2015-2017

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