ARTISTS TO KNOW: ELISE SWOPES
Photography: Nabila Wirakusumah
Creative Direction & Production: Bianca Jean-Pierre & Nabila Wirakusumah
About a year ago, Elise Swopes graciously invited SHEER to her Sunrise Art Club event at Seed Brklyn during Brooklyn NFT Week. Elise had already secured her status as a widely successful photographer and NFT artist selling over $200,000 worth of digital art. At the time, NFTs and Web3 felt very elusive, a little pretentious, and very bro-like, but here we were, a group of multicultural women and femmes at Seed Brklyn on yoga mats sharing our feelings and bonding with one another between sound baths and live meditations. Elise shared her access and knowledge of Web3 to create a welcoming and healing space for any creative who was curious about this new tech frontier to be educated and also feel validated that they belonged.
In addition to Sunrise Art Club, Elise’s impact extends to her initiative, Night on The Yard which is the first marketplace in existence for incarcerated artists that’s helping grant them the tools, mentorship, and access to Web3.
Elise is more than just her successes and industry impact. She also gets personal with us about her upbringing, her time as a rapper in Chicago, overcoming addiction struggles, and healing her inner world through self-exploration.
Elise Swopes in conversation with Bianca (SHEER Founder) and Nabila (SHEER Creative Director).
Bianca: When did you start going by Swopes? Does everyone call you that?
Elise Swopes: Maybe a few people who knew me before I was a rapper in the 2010s.
Bianca: You were a rapper?? Tell us more..
Elise: Yeahhh, I was rapping in like 2010/2011 and then I was in a rap group back in Chicago called Treated Crew. “Treated” was this word in Chicago where people would be like “Treeaaateddd”. But the group was founded by Kanye West’s DJ at the time named Mano. Mano and I actually never really got along at all. But one time he called me because he heard one of my records and was like, I need you to be a part of this group. So I was the only girl in an all guy group and we dropped records every Friday. Kind of the same thing Kanye was doing when he was dropping records every week. So it was really fun. Jay-Z was wearing our Treated hats and I was on Eminem’s radio station.
Bianca: So where can we find this music now?
Elise: I’m the only Elise Swopes in the world so if you look up my name, yeah it’s still out there and the music videos are still out there.
Nabila: Do you still make music?
Elise: I’ve been thinking about it and writing some stuff but I just don't have time. And I also just don't like the music industry that much. Not a fan of it.
Bianca: I've heard a lot of negative things about the music industry, especially from women.
Elise: I just don’t like the game. It’s such a weird game and I'm not interested. I'm not an ignorant person. I'm very outspoken and I don’t like bullshit and I don’t like bad shit. And you have to kind of look to the side.
Bianca: So taking things even further back, what was little Elise like? How was it growing up in Chicago?
Elise: I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and my parents were divorced. So my mom would go to work and then my dad would come home and teach me and my brother, so we were homeschooled till the fourth grade. When I was homeschooled, I would get on the computer and started teaching myself how to use Photoshop and Illustrator and HTML and stuff like that. So I taught myself how to own my own website by the time I was like ten.
Bianca: Boss.
Nabila: What was your first website?
Elise: This is when I'll go even far back. So I was hosting on FTPs. FTPs at the time were these programs where I would have to upload certain homepages and graphics so that it would show up on the page. I was a part of these different forums and there was this girl who owned this forum that everyone was on and you could learn how to mine on this forum.
Nabila: What was it called?
Elise: Jazzygirl.com She ended up wanting to sell it and I, as like an 11 year old, was just like, I’ll buy it. So I bought the forum.
Nabila: How much was it?
Elise: I remember asking my dad and it was probably like 80 bucks or something. And he’s like what do you need this for? I was like, please, please I just want it. But also at the same time, I was running these towns on this site called The Palace. It's this chat thing where you have different avatars.
Bianca: So you were a mayor to haha. You're a web investor and a mayor…
Nabila: All before the age of 12 haha.
Elise: Haha yes yes. I was doing a lot of crazy shit. I was just obsessed with everything digital at that age. I was a little kid just wanting to create websites and talk to people on AIM and make shit.
“ When I was homeschooled, I would get on the computer and started teaching myself how to use Photoshop and Illustrator and HTML and stuff like that. So I taught myself how to own my own website by the time I was like ten.”
Nabila: How would you describe your aesthetic taste at that age on these forums?
Elise: I love pixels. I loved Kawaii stuff. Anything that was super Japanese or anime and colorful and cute. Sometimes I would make celebrity edits in Photoshop too. Remember those fan websites? Like Y2K vibes…
Bianca: Did y’all have Xanga?
Nabila: Yes!
Elise: I loved Xanga, absolutely.
Nabila: People talk about Myspace but there was Xanga, LiveJournal…
Elise: Angel Fire!
Bianca: The internet was such a fun, wild and free place. So you being a mogul at such a young age and doing all this really cool tech and digital work, how did that tie into your career now?
Elise: So I started college in 2008 but I dropped out after my first semester. I failed so many of my classes. I hated going to class and hated being in the classroom. I hated my teachers. I just felt like everyone was annoying. I was at Columbia College in downtown Chicago. At the time TRL was a thing and I wanted to be a VJ on TRL. I wanted to get my journalism degree but TRL got canceled that year and I was like I don't give a fuck about the show anymore so I dropped out. That's when I became a rapper.
Bianca: How old were you?
Elise: I was like 19 or 20 at the time. Then I met my now fiance at 21. He graduated from music school and was a producer and also an engineer in the studio and would help me record some of my raps at his house when I moved in with him. I was also homeless. I didn't have to be homeless. My mom was like, you can live with me, but I was like fuck that, and was sleeping on blow up mattresses at friends' houses.
Bianca: How did you meet your fiance?
Elise: We were at a mutual friend's birthday party in Chicago. I was seeing someone else at the time. I just saw him from across the bar. He saw me and it was like this love at first sight thing 100%. I've never seen him before. So I went up to one of his friends and his friend was like, he just asked me about you. I was like, oh shit, here we go.
Neither of us were photographers at the time. Neither of us were creators. Now we're both professional creatives. He's got 600,000 followers on Instagram.
Bianca: Wow, as a producer, still?
Elise: No, as a photographer, But he was a bassist and an engineer for Rockie Fresh, who’s a rapper.
Bianca: I feel like when you date someone at that age, people change a lot and y'all are still together and engaged. How did you navigate that?
Elise: Yeah I mean we broke up a couple of times. I was 20 when I met him and now I'm 34. I had to grow up. He had to grow up. We had to learn how to communicate with one another. It’s a lot. But we never really changed either. We're still kind of the same people in a weird way.
We have so much in common and he's my best friend. I can't imagine myself with anyone else. We built our lives together in such a way that I just can't imagine being separated. But I had to grow up a lot. I also went through a lot of addiction issues. I didn't know how to pay bills. When I met him he really babied me in a way because he took care of everything. I moved in with him and I didn't get a chance to do my own thing and grow up.
Bianca: I’m trying to keep up with all of your creative pursuits because you are so multidimensional. How did photography come into play? You didn’t want to study journalism anymore and you were basically done with the music industry, so how did you find your next thing?
Elise: I would say photography was creeping in during MySpace but not as serious as I was taking it now. But then I became a little bit more serious when I got on Instagram. I had a broken iPhone 4. I signed up for this platform and I'm like, I don't know what this is but I'm just gonna start posting.
Nabila: What were you putting out there?
Elise: I remember very specifically, I was going to SxSW for the first time and I remember screenshotting Google Maps from where we were driving from Chicago to Austin. And that was one of my first posts.
So eventually I started taking it a little bit more seriously. I started taking photos of cityscapes and stuff like that. Then Instagram chose me as a suggested user and I started getting thousands of followers a day after that.
Bianca: Wow.
Elise: I'm like, alright, well, I gotta do something about this. So I resorted back to that kid I was, building a brand for myself, built a website, and got a manager.
Bianca: How quickly did all of that happen?
Elise: In like a matter of a year or two. It happened really fast. This was like 2012/2013.
Nabila: You were on there really early.
Elise: I was one of the first influencers to work with Nike, one of the first people to work with Apple, one of the first to work with Instagram.
Bianca: How did this then expand into your other pursuits with Web3? Well you call it Web 2.5 because we're not fully there yet haha. Tell us more about how you got into that.
Elise: I just love to keep an open mind. I think that's the most important thing. It’s the reason why I started on Instagram and the only reason why I do anything is because I'm curious. I'm just like, what is that? What does that mean? Whenever I'm scared or worried that something’s taking my job, I'm never doing anything out of desperation but instead, this is the next step. For me, thinking about NFTs, I had already worked with people on a couple of Adobe projects. I was working with J. Silva who was another friend of mine from Instagram, and they were all popping off. I’m seeing friends and colleagues popping off and thinking maybe I should try this.
I did a lot of interviews with friends, read a lot of different blogs, and watched a lot of videos. I was studying everybody's work that they were posting and sharing. I wanted to study before I released something. I realized that SuperRare was one of the next big platforms at that time and I got accepted after I applied. My first piece sold for $17,000.
Bianca: Epic.
Elise: It was terrifying. I was sweating and crying for like two, three days. But it was amazing. I thought my life was gonna completely change, and it has to an extent. The next one sold for like $20,000 and then the next one for $30,000 and then the next one sold for $60,000.
Bianca: What were you selling specifically?
Elise: I was selling my surrealist creations I make on my iPhone. I was the first iPhone NFT artist to sell photographs from my phone and then edit them in a surreal way with my phone. I was doing a cityscape, a waterfall. And then I did another piece that was a composite of other photos that I had like a spinning city. There's another one of a bus station and snow, that’s one of my favorites.
Bianca: That one sounds very moody.
Elise: Yeah they’re all very moody, very vibey. They all have a bit of emotion but it’s on purpose because there’s a dynamic with NFTs where you want it to be interesting. Not everyone needs to, but I felt that gave my art a little bit more power.
I did another collection on Nifty Gateway where I had a partnership with a Kenyan conservation and I worked with their giraffe conservation. I had this crazy idea where I was going to promote giraffe displacement by displacing myself. I went to six different cities in a week. Which by the way, you might think it’s fun but it's fucking hard! I went to Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Colorado, New York, and Atlanta. It was exhausting.
Bianca: Wow, how long did this take?
Elise: Like a week. I was basically recording myself the whole time. The concept was that I wanted to showcase that giraffes are dying because people are displacing them by going to these waterholes, but it's also not their fault because people are also being displaced by companies and tons of other shit. It was a storyline to showcase how difficult it is not to be home. And it was very fucking hard.
Bianca: That's such an empathetic approach to art. Literally putting yourself in the position of the subject or whatever you're trying to talk about.
“I was one of the first influencers to work with Nike, one of the first people to work with Apple, one of the first to work with Instagram.”
Nabila: I do some digital art and I don't know if you have this experience, but when I was in school, there's not a lot of respect for digital art vs. traditional mediums. There's this idea that when you're doing digital art, you're just doing everything on your computer. I think it really strikes me that your medium is digital but you physically put yourself in all of these different cities to experience this feeling of displacement, which makes your work stand out, you know?
Elise: I still don't think people understood that process but one day they will. I mean, there are a lot of people who probably bought the work and they still don't know what I did. They have no idea.
Bianca: I love that though because I feel like there's so much instant gratification, especially with creativity. And it's hard because you want to sustain yourself as a creative and as an artist and keep up with that. But at the same time, I love art where it takes time for you to really process it. for sure. I love going back to a piece or a book and being like, Oh, I didn't catch that the first time or I didn't really understand that at first, but it's starting to make sense.
Elise: Every year after I've done that project, I couldn't be more proud of myself. Every year I'm like damn, I really did that.
Nabila: Because your art and your journey as an artist has been so linked to social media, there's an audience that's going to digest it and project their interpretations on your ideas. How do you feel about that relationship?
Elise: It's an ironic thing, actually, because the giraffe relationship is something that was created because of my relationship with my followers. When I first started, I was putting different animals in my art like gorillas, elephants, polar bears, and stuff like that. When I started putting giraffes in my artwork around 2012ish, people kept asking for them like where's the next giraffe? Or what's it’s name? So that's why I kept doing it like, alright, this is our friend now, this is our homie. Sometimes, it'll be really small in my hand, and sometimes it's just as tall as a building. It changes sizes and sometimes there's more than one. You know, it's a fun thing.
Nabila: Yeah, the feedback is a part of the conversation with the audience.
Elise: I grew up on the internet and I have a TEDx talk called Child of the Internet. It's about growing up on the internet and showing everybody your successes, but also being there for the negatives and navigating those negatives yourself. Also understanding that there are dynamics on the internet that you can choose to enable. During my TEDx talk, I talked a lot about my failures, my drug addictions, my rehab, and how the Internet affected me in that way. But then the other end of that was when I was getting clean, the Internet helped me in looking for all of these different books that I wanted to read, all of these different meditations, conversations, and affirmations that I needed and required to get better. And then I was muting and blocking shit that didn't work for me. Yeah, the internet is fucked up but it's also a safe place where we can really build our own worlds.
Bianca: Yeah, I feel like sometimes your back is against the wall before you experience some of the biggest transformations in your life.
Elise: I almost lost everything, but for some reason, I was still getting hired for shit and people were still ignoring the thing that was very obvious, that I was troubled. Like, is anyone gonna help me or do I have to help myself? So that's when I became my own best friend. And my own fuckin therapist, like no therapy was gonna help me because I was therapy-ing my therapists haha. Like she knows what I already know. I was elevating and studying biology and psychology. I studied everything and wanted to know why am I thinking this way or that way. I started reading books about forgiveness and judgment. The more I realized that I judged other people, the more I was judging myself. Whatever people are saying, has nothing to do with me. And that's just how I live my life now.
Nabila: At what age did this hit for you?
Elise: 27. 25 was my worst year. I went all out and just went ham hanging out with all the celebrities in Chicago. I was around everybody. I was doing all the shit, hanging out with all of the rappers and it was fucking horrible. People were cheating on each other, stealing, they were robbing each other. People were on drugs. People were sick, literally on their deathbeds and I was surrounded by it. And then I'm hearing all these things around me about how amazing these people are and I'm like, no they’re not! They’re not amazing.
Bianca: The validity of a lot of creativity right now is rooted in like celebrity fame or attention and validation. I try not to feed into it with the work that I do, but how do you see past those illusions?
Elise: You remember that every single person is a fucking person. That is how you always stay grounded. That begins with studying people, studying humans, studying yourself. It's really as simple as that.
Bianca: Let’s get into human design, which is something that you taught me about. At what point did you discover this? Was it during your journey to sobriety?
Elise: Human design actually started for me maybe a year ago? It was the last step in my understanding of what astrology is. When I first started, it was about the power of now. Now I have awareness and mindfulness. I can do different things from my mind, right? Then it's my soul and also my heart, like let's make decisions from our sacral. So that was becoming more clear.
After a couple years of understanding awareness, now I’m getting deeper into astrology. Now I’m getting into the deeper reasons of my behavior and studying a little bit more about Sagittarius things, Virgo Moon things, Cancer rising and Venus things. There were still a lot of words I didn’t understand, but I just wanted to understand my part in all of this. I don't know how I found it, but I found this Instagram @puregenerators. She was just speaking facts to me and I’m like damn, what is this? What does this mean? What is going on here? Because why do I feel heard all of a sudden? I started digging into Human Design and found out I’m a Generator.
Nabila: There are so many different modalities of understanding ourselves so what made astrology and human design in particular, feel like a good fit for you?
Elise: I feel like I had an answer now to why I felt certain ways and how I needed to behave for certain reasons. I can't just listen to anyone. There have been a lot of issues with me where someone is like “Why can't you just create content like this?” And it's as simple as I don't want to.
“The more I realized that I judged other people, the more I was judging myself. Whatever people are saying has nothing to do with me. And that’s just how I live my life now.”
Nabila: I think there's something so beautiful about relinquishing that control and it’s cosmic. I’m destined to function this way.
Bianca: Yeah, surrendering.
Elise: It’s so difficult though. When I'm talking to my advisor and I'm like, listen, I don't want to do what you said because my sacral is not about that. He's just like I don’t know what the fuck you’re taking about. I'm a Generator so I'm a leader. I don't like doing things that other people do. I'm very, like sacral driven. So when my gut says it, that's when I do it. But if everything else is like no, then I don't want to do it.
Bianca: As a Manifesting Generator, I’m also big on following my sacral but sometimes I struggle with trusting my gut because it can feel like an irrational fear from past traumas. Even though I know my intuition and my gut is very strong and usually right. Do you ever feel that way or have a hard time distinguishing between the two?
Elise: Sometimes the gut is also telling us we should be afraid. It's also an emotion and a message from the body. So if your body is saying hey, maybe we shouldn't do this then maybe we shouldn’t.
But yeah! I’m scared a lot of the time but that’s more rational. I have to understand that the mind has a fear of how can I do something and when I spend time thinking about how, that's the rational shit and that's not what we should focus on. How shouldn't be a problem for us, we’ll figure it out either way. It's the why. Like why do we want to do it? Does it excite us? Does it make you happy to do it? Does it give you life? Does it give you energy? But if it doesn’t, then get the fuck away from that shit haha.
If it ain’t a hell yes, it’s a hell no! We can get very burnt out and exhausted very quickly doing shit we don't like.
Bianca: Well speaking of doing shit that you do like, I had the opportunity to attend your event Seed The Sunrise at Seed Brklyn last year. It was a beautiful and centered around the work you're doing in the Web3 space, but felt different because it wasn’t a tech conference or bro kind of vibe. That world can feel like a lot of mansplaining, but this was truly for women and community-centered. So tell us more about your community at Sunrise Art Club.
Elise: Sunrise is my response to the crypto bro shit haha. I found a lot of success in Web3 and I'm getting collected by huge collectors, but then I started seeing some weird stuff happening, like a lot of sexism, racism, ignorance. So for me, I wanted to reinvest all of that money back into a team that I love, people that I trust, and into a project that will give back.
Sunrise became the first NFT collection that would drop a new sunrise NFT every single day for an entire year. And to make that happen, I had to hire one of the best engineers, Lauren Dorman who I've been friends with for a very long time. Lauren helped me put together a contract based on nouns and it was called Nouns DAO at the time. Nouns DAO released a generative NFT everyday which means you basically use a code and then it would generate this character and people could bid on it. It was getting bids of like 100 ETH a day. And 75% of every sale, will go back to our funds at Sunrise so we can give back to charities, and initiatives like our incarceration project. We were donating to tons of people including helping get Nigerians out of Ukraine when they weren’t letting them out.
Bianca: What’s the incarceration project?
Elise: It’s called Night on the Yard and it’s the first marketplace in existence for incarcerated artists. We’re hopefully getting a grant soon to start our next initiative which is partnering outside artists with inside artists to mentor and to do a collection together so hopefully that happens soon.
Bianca: Amazing.
Elise: We hired two women of color to teach them how to create their first NFT collection.
Bianca: I love your Sunrise Instagram too, @ilovesunriseart, because it's literally a picture of a sunrise everyday.
Elise: So those sunrises are from 2017 to 2020. I was waking up at 5am everyday to read, write, meditate, and work out. Basically setting the tone for myself because I'm healing again. I'm getting clean and changing my life. Those sunrises I'm seeing, I’m taking a photo of everyday. Once NFT's came around, I thought maybe I'll just use my sunrises for that.
Bianca: I love that connection and everything you do being so intentional.
Nabila: You’re so much of yourself with what you’re putting out there.
Elise: I've always been like, people could come and go. But you're always with yourself.
Bianca: That’s a whole word!
Elise: I remember when no one cared about my art. Not even my fucking friends. Like I remember when my friends were like, what are you doing with your phone on Instagram. People had no fucking clue what I was doing.
Bianca: It’s really hard when you are trying to start something and you know people care about you but they may not get it.
Elise: That's not your audience. It may never be your audience.
Bianca: That’s so real. Your friends might not be your audience.
Elise: I’ve never relied on my friends or my family to believe in what I wanted. They’ll eventually come around.
Nabila: I was talking to a friend and she was talking about how she had been feeling very lonely. And then she was like, I want to shift that, and instead of saying that she was alone, or lonely, she would say, “I'm with myself.”
Elise: I love that. And innovation is lonely, too. Being an innovator and a Generator, more than anything is a very lonely road, because you don't do a lot of what other people do. You have your own opinions, your own thoughts, and your own imagination. And we’re very long-term thinkers so that's not everybody. A lot of people are very hedonistic and short-term thinkers.
“If it ain’t a hell yes, it’s a hell no! We can get very burnt out and exhausted very quickly doing shit we don’t like.”
Bianca: I’m realizing as I get older that I need a lot of time to myself. And people are like you don’t want to go out as much and I had a friend recently tell me I act like I’m 65 haha. But I’m really trying to learn how to be with myself. Because I've been running from myself for so long.
Elise: A lot of people are. That’s why COVID was very tough for a lot of people because they’ve never been alone with themselves.
Bianca: What are you most excited about right now? What’s bringing you joy?
Elise: I think what's bringing me joy is the fact that I can somehow manifest anything I want. But that also comes with a lot of opportunity to learn. I have to be careful what I ask for because every time I do, there's an evolution. There’s growth and with growth comes change so you have to be willing to go with that flow of change which can be scary. But on the other side of that fear and overwhelm is the growth so I can’t wait to get over there.
In January I was questioning everything. I still love my work and I still love what I do but I'm also like how do I make money in my sleep? How do I not have to work with brands? How do I not have to get up and fucking go all the time, you know?
Then I got hired by Adobe. I'm an evangelist at Adobe, which is a really big fucking deal because they haven't hired an evangelist in many years.
Bianca: What does that mean?
Elise: An evangelist is basically someone you see doing the keynotes at Adobe MAX and the people who are front-facing the demos at all of the events I'm basically doing all the secret drops and I know about like everything and doing all the beta testing and giving tons of feedback with the teams. I’m also in every single one of our communities like Discord, Reddit, the community forums, I'm always on X, Threads, and Instagram engaging with people's content. Now it's so different with evangelists because we're a whole new generation so there's a whole new dynamic that's happening at Adobe and I'm really excited.
Bianca: How’s the culture there?
Elise: It's amazing. I’m very blessed to be on the team that I'm on because we’re a creative driven team. I'm more on the end of content, having fun, and engaging with people. I'm also listening to people and relaying that information back. I literally get to be myself for a living. I would have never done the job otherwise.
I've been offered other jobs. I’ve said no because I don't want to work for a celebrity. That would change my entire life to have to answer to somebody else's creativity. Abso-fucking-lutely not.
Bianca: More power to you.
Elise: There have been a lot of jobs I’ve said no to and I’m like I probably fucked myself, but then years later it all made sense to say no.
Nabila: You’ve shared so much wisdom with us and are so fearless. Just creating space for us in Web3 and NFTs where I’ve been very turned off by how bro-ey it is…
Elise: It’s your world. It’s our world. We can do whatever we want! We can just ignore them.
Photography by Nabila Wirakusumah
NYALLAH is known for blending elements of neo-soul, R&B, hip-hop, and West African rhythms while exploring themes of self-expansion, transformation, and love. With their latest project, R+B, recorded in phases spanning a near-death bike accident and an eye-opening trip to Costa Rica, R+B navigates relationships, desirability, and self-awareness from a black queer perspective. Through enchanting vocals and vulnerable lyrics, NYALLAH reminds us that desirability is not love and our liberation lies in de-centering ourselves and prioritizing collective care.