AGE: 31
BASED IN: New York

Drake Carr made his first foray into the art world on the walls of a Bushwick dive bar.

When Happyfun Hideaway wanted to commission a vibrant work to adorn its dance floor, the Flint, Michigan, native— who also tended bar at the watering hole—delivered. The 31-year-old multimedia artist adorned the space with raunchy, life-sized figures inspired by peers and friends that would later become his signature. “Gum would get stuck to them and sweaty people would press up against them,” the artist remembers. “It’s really satisfying to see these things that I labored over get lived on.”

The distinctly cosmopolitan nature of Carr’s work has drawn the attention of numerous gallerists with an eye for the off-kilter: The artist has shown at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles along with New York hot spots like Fierman, Situations, and Ethan James Green’s New York Life Gallery. For the latter, Carr held one of his “walk-ins”—live portrait-drawing sessions in which he whips up stylized fashion sketches that illustrate the whimsy of his New York contemporaries—the second iteration of which was held at Mariposa Drive in Paris last March.

“I find myself drawn to art that feels collaborative in some way,” Carr reasons. For the artist, there’s a difference between his private sketchbooks, which he fills with drawings born out of “compulsion,” and the work he creates with an audience in mind. “A lot of the people I’m drawing are in these very graphic, dramatic poses that come from the poses that I’m in myself as I work,” Carr continues. “It’s sort of like dancing—often I’ll end up actually dancing and then getting back to drawing.”

Next year will be a busy one for Carr, who has a solo show at Megan Mulrooney Gallery in Los Angeles in April and another one slated for the fall with Kapp Kapp in New York. In the meantime, his nightlife roots remain an essential part of his artistic identity. “When I imagine a museum survey of my work … my mind goes to creating installations of some of the places where my art has lived,” Carr muses. This personal connection draws out the emotions of each of his subjects—and renders a snapshot of a community that’s constantly reinventing itself.