What is the Kingdom of Leisure?
The Kingdom of Leisure is a multifaceted, long-running conceptual art and media project created by artist Ty Hardaway. It blends elements of satire, subversive media, autobiography, culture-jamming, and underground aesthetics. The project doesn’t fit into traditional categories easily—it’s part philosophy, part performance, part media experiment.
Core Characteristics:
• DIY ethos: It’s rooted in zine culture, lo-fi media, and self-publishing
• Alter-egos and mythology: It uses personas, pseudonyms, and invented histories to explore identity, truth, and storytelling
• Art as lifestyle: The “Kingdom” blurs the line between life and art, turning everyday existence into performance or commentary
• Critical of systems: Often critiques capitalism, consumerism, pop culture, and mainstream art narratives
• Underground legacy: Though obscure to the mainstream, it’s influential within certain underground and indie circle
Formats It’s Taken:
• Web content (blogs, essays, cryptic posts)
• Visual art and graphics
• Street photography and photo essays
• Audio productions and experimental music
• Conceptual writing and manifestos
Notable Themes:
• Leisure as resistance
• Time as an artistic medium
• Subversion of media norms
• The absurdity of modern life
• Narrative non-linearity and disinformation as tools
In a way, The Kingdom of Leisure is both a mirror and a distortion field, challenging the viewer to question what’s real, what’s performance, and what it means to truly create outside institutional boundaries.
Key Persona: Ty Hardaway
Ty Hardaway is both the artist and a character within the Kingdom. He plays with identity like a medium: sometimes he’s the documentarian, other times the agitator, the wanderer, the teacher, or the dropout. You’ll never fully pin him down—which is kind of the point.
Hardaway often uses his own life (especially aspects of race, class, and subculture) as a kind of self-aware performance, blurring autobiography and fiction.
Key Concept: “Leisure as Resistance”
This is central to the Kingdom’s ethos: to opt out, slow down, and refuse commodified productivity is a radical act. In the face of hustle culture and capitalist pressure, choosing leisure—on your own terms—is a form of protest.
“We create because we must. Not for clicks. Not for fame. Just because.”
Notable Work: The Origin of Leisure
One of the foundational texts/images from the Kingdom’s early days is a mix of manifesto, autobiography, and cultural critique. It might include a childhood memory, a scanned Polaroid, and a cryptic note scrawled in Sharpie—all part of a larger story that never fully explains itself.
It might look like:
“I was born in the Kingdom of Leisure. We weren’t poor, but we were invisible.”
[photo of a BMX bike leaning on a chain link fence]
“We knew time better than clocks. And we never asked for permission.”
This blend of visual, textual, and conceptual layers is signature to the project.
Example Piece: “#streetphotography”
On the surface, this is just a blog or photo series. But it’s full of nuance—capturing mundane or raw scenes with subtle social commentary. It pushes against the Instagram aesthetic. No filters, no pretense. Just the world as it is, framed through the lens of someone who isn’t trying to impress, but document.
A crumpled hot dog wrapper on a sidewalk becomes a commentary on American consumption.
Themes Revisited Over Time
• Growing up Black in a white suburb
• Disappearing before being erased
• Walking as a form of meditation and rebellion
• Failure, dropout culture, and “doing nothing”
• The absurd seriousness of being a “serious artist”
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Here is an original Kingdom of Leisure-style piece, in the tone and format that echoes Ty Hardaway’s work: a mix of visual cue, poetic manifesto, autobiographical fragmentation, and critique through the lens of leisure and resistance.
“OFF THE CLOCK”
by the Kingdom of Leisure
LOCATION: somewhere east of nowhere
DATE: nevermind
CONDITION: unbothered
[Image: cracked pavement, broken payphone, weed poking through]
I wasn’t born tired, I became it.
Not the good kind either.
The kind they bake into you in third grade when they say
“Raise your hand to go to the bathroom.”
So I stopped raising my hand.
They told me I had “so much potential.”
They said it like a warning.
Like I was a grenade
That forgot it had a pin.
So I wandered.
So I made things.
So I dropped out of expectations
And started punching clocks with my middle finger.
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Somewhere between a flipped sign at a closed bodega
And a rusted bike frame chained to nothing,
I realized:
This is my kingdom.
Not the one with gold-plated ambition
But the one where the sun hits the concrete just right
And time finally gives up chasing me
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Slogans I carry like lint in my pocket:
• Leisure is sacred
• Art doesn’t ask for a résumé
• The revolution will not have a LinkedIn
• If it doesn’t feed your soul, it’s probably trying to sell you something
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NOTES TO SELF:
• Stay weird
• Say no
• Take photos even if no one looks
• Walk slow(ly)
• Die free
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