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Phaze Gawd launches For Artist by Artist to highlight local talent
that shit will really start changing your perspective on a lot of stuff.” And though he isn’t discussing it in the moment, that statement speaks to Potts’ mission with his latest venture, For Artist By Artist, or FAxA, a new platform he’s launching to serve as a free promotional tool for his fellow Charlotte creatives.
multitude of services to local artists, all of which free of cost: video shoots, photo shoots, content creation (video interviews, storytelling, etc.), marketing, event planning and more. The inspiration behind FAxA came from Potts’ recent return to Charlotte after spending two years living in Durham. Having grown up in Charlotte and built his name in the local hip-hop scene as Phaze Gawd, Potts was Preparing for the spotlight concerned that the Queen City was going to miss a Building on the connections that he’s cultivated as a rapper in the Queen City, Potts plans to offer a big opportunity.
Pg. 8 JUL 14 - JUL 27, 2021 - QCNERVE.COM
BY RYAN PITKIN
In Anthony Potts’ tiny studio space sits a table with a computer, a chair, a couch and some shelves. Above the couch hangs a lone painting done as a collaborative piece by local artists Traphouse Art and Francesko the Artist. But Potts, a local rapper who performs as Phaze Gawd, doesn’t need to fit much more into the space to serve as inspiration. After all, just outside the curtain next to his computer is a fortune of local art, all done by the artists housed at Charlotte Art League, a nonprofit visual arts organization located on Raleigh Street at the northern tip of Charlotte’s NoDa neighborhood. As we walk through the vast warehouse on the way to his studio, we pass a sculpture of Queen Charlotte just like the statue that sits in front of the Charlotte Douglas International Airport — except not really. Upon closer look, there are differences. First of all, her crown is bejeweled by beer-bottle tops, but less obvious changes include her hair, which is made of extension cords and phone lines. The sculpture was made for an upcoming show, but mum’s the word on that for now. Potts has only been in the space for a couple months, but it’s already having an effect on his creative drive. “Seeing all this local art, these are people in the city, so these are people that are here, my next-door neighbors,” he says. “This is what they do. How could I not know these people? I would be doing myself a disservice not trying to find who these people are and find out what these people do, their journey, because when you really start looking at someone’s art, and really start understanding the concept of art and reading between the lines and getting the stories of the people,
PHAZE GAWD PHOTO BY JOYLAND
He feared that COVID had the potential to undermine the explosive growth that Charlotte hiphop had been experiencing leading up to 2020. “There was this scarcity,” he said of moving back to Charlotte in November. “Of course, I’m coming back in the midst of the height of COVID, so there was not a lot of stuff going on, but even beforehand I was noting that there were not as many events as there was before — that I noticed, that I saw. I don’t know if it was just a lack of promotion for events, but I just didn’t see as many events being thrown as I had usually seen before moving and coming back. I was not seeing a lot of that movement in the city that I’m usually used to.” Of course, this is happening to creative scenes across the country in the wake of the pandemic. Musicians, visual artists and other creatives all around the world have only just begun poking their heads out from whatever their setup was during quarantine, looking for ways to share what they’ve created over the past 15 months and reconnect with their peers and patrons. But as Potts points out, Charlotte and the Carolinas — specifically the local hip-hop scene — have all the more reason to pick up where they left off, as a spotlight had recently hit the area thanks to the charttopping success of artists such as DaBaby. “DaBaby has blown up Charlotte on a grand scale, so we have a lot more people coming through the city of Charlotte, a lot more people coming through the Carolinas as a whole trying to find talent, just being here,” Potts says, “so having that new spotlight has definitely opened a lot more lanes and opportunities to be seen.” But are Charlotte artists ready to be seen when folks come looking?
