2025 Booooooom Illustration Awards: Meet The Judges

James Jean is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose works explore imagination and reality through narrative-driven, layered compositions. His expressionistic, painterly approach to mark-making blends figuration with abstraction in works that are at once technically precise and gestural. Collaborations of note include work with Prada, Yohji Yamamoto, Guillermo Del Toro, and Darren Aronofsky.

 
Akiko Stehrenberger is a 29-time CLIO Award–winning movie poster artist and art director known for her versatility and concept-driven designs. She is also tall.

 
Evan Pricco was the editor in chief of Juxtapoz Magazine from 2006—2024, and in 2025, founded The Unibrow, an arts, culture, design and fiction publication. He has curated over 20 shows internationally, including Juxtapoz x Superflat with Takashi Murakami and I’d Love To See You, a survey of Juxtapoz at 30 years. He has authored 15 books and continues to contribute to various publications and catalogs, including Playboy, Family Style, Beyond the Streets and more.

Phil Chang is the founder of C47, a creative and strategic solutions group primarily based in New York City (since 2017). Select partners/clients include: Netflix, Bottega Veneta, Riot Games, Arc’teryx, A24, Cash App, Grailed. Before establishing C47, Phil worked at Wieden+Kennedy New York and Apple.

We asked each of them a few questions to give you a chance to learn more about who they are, what inspires them, and how they see the world. Enjoy!

James Jean: 1) When I first got a copy of Wolverine #37 in the 6th grade. The detailed drawings of anatomy and violence blew my hormone addled mind.

2) The second was the Kafkaesque dissolution of my marriage in my late 20s and early 30s, which bankrupted me and forced me to leave the country and live in hiding for almost 2 years.

3) The third is the birth of my son—I erupted in tears of happiness when it happened, which totally surprised me since I’m usually quite reserved.

Phil Chang: 1) Deleting my Xanga after the spine-tingling realization that it was still live nearly a decade after I stopped using it.

2) April 29, 2011 (Fast Five premieres in American cinemas).

3) Whenever my mom took me to try tonkatsu for the first time in my life (thanks mom, love you mom). 

Akiko Stehrenberger: 1) In high school, I nearly joined the Army until my mom encouraged me to try “this art thing” instead.

2) Art school changed my life—before that I felt like an alien. Raves and molly during this time, helped me come out of my shell and get really bad tattoos.

3) Caring for my mom in her final year was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it prepared me for motherhood and was an honor I’ll always treasure.

Evan Pricco: This is something I’m constantly trying to find the “source material” for. It’s difficult because I always want to go back to being like 13 and hearing Oasis “Live Forever” on Live105 radio station in the Bay Area—“there is more out there” than what I was seeing around me everyday. Like I had my thing, this sound that was what I was feeling being played by a band a million miles away. But it connected and it was instantaneously injected into my subconscious as the soundtrack to my life from then on. Like DNA. 

1) Seeing a Barry McGee tag on the streets of San Francisco in the late 1990s and being able to piece together, literally, who that was. That led me to the Mission School and Juxtapoz. It was what I was to become and wanted to be. I wanted to be in the arts, I wanted to be a journalist, I wanted to talk about something outside of traditional pop-culture, so this was the start. 

2) I would say seeing Tom Waits in concert in 1999. I know I am going old-school here but for some reason, this just sticks with me. I didn’t know much about him, I didn’t really know his songs, but I went with some friends and it was one of the most absurdly wonderful, weird, dark, funny, brilliant bits of performance art I had ever seen to that point and to this point really. It just opened my mind to what was possible with art, with stage craft, with a persona. I think about this all the time when I write about artists. 

3) Going to see this wonderful Francis Bacon show with my girlfriend, Kim, a few years ago at the Royal Academy in London. I think it was something about really seeing, like feeling it in the rhythm of the show, how much a curator and production design team can make a difference in how you understand and appreciate an artist. My partner is really in tune with that for her career, and thinking about lighting, spacing, the way a room can speak to another, the way you as a viewer can re-evaluate your own relationship to the art. I think about it all the time now, not just when I curate a show but how I want a magazine to be seen and flipped through and read. These things matter and, too often, we take it for granted.

Phil Chang: It’s taken me the better part of 39 years to learn that I hate being bad at something while I’m learning it, which makes me not want to start learning that thing in the first place. Excruciating loop that I grapple with daily!  

Akiko Stehrenberger: 1) I am still learning how to have better boundaries with clients and people in general. 2) Taking beta blockers with alcohol will ruin a second date.

Evan Pricco: That no matter how hard you try to make smart, carefully considered, well-curated, and serious content in regards to art, if an audience thinks of you as one thing you will always find it hard to be taken seriously. I think about this a lot, and it has, at times, really made me question myself and the decisions I have made. 

I think being the editor of a popular magazine for nearly 20 years—a magazine that had a certain caché but also, I guess you can say, a certain position in the art world—when we would do really boldly critical writing or a podcast that touched on some very subversive or politically challenging, we often weren’t considered the voice of record for so much of the last 20 years of art writing. And that hurts because I think we did it better than most. 

I remember reading the founder of Hyperallergic calling us an uncritical art magazine, and it was such a wonderfully rude and dismissive comment about how hard we all work, the artists that have been in our pages, the really critical work we actually did but often got pushed aside by… well, you get it.

James Jean: I’ve had to learn to be kind to myself. There’s a difference between self-deprecation and self-defecation. 

Akiko Stehrenberger: This summer camp for high school kids, called Prodigy Arts Camp, blew my mind. Not only was I in complete awe of what these kids could do in such a short amount of time, I loved the camaraderie between them all, and the staff.

Phil Chang: Sun Woo’s latest works in progress. She just gets nicer and nicer and nicer with every passing show. The level of detail and thematic ambition she’s able to capture through her paintings and (more recently) sculpture alike…staggering.

Evan Pricco: Oasis at the Rose Bowl. This incredible woodblock print room at the National Museum in Tokyo. Noah Davis’ show at the Hammer Museum.

James Jean: I tried to sing Kiss from a Rose at karaoke in Japan. It did not go well. 

Evan Pricco: I just had one. I founded my own magazine, The Unibrow. I did it all with my best friend, Nisan Perera, and we did it all with a group of friends and colleagues. Created our own brand, infrastructure, marketing, design, did our launch in Japan with BEAMS and it will go worldwide in the next few weeks. It went well, but perhaps ask me in a year how it’s going! It’s been so special and wonderful so far, and I love all the artists and writers and friends who have helped. It was a community, socialist-project, the way it should be. 

Phil Chang: I started working out, snorting creatine, and eating better last fall. That shit works as advertised, disappointingly. 

Akiko Stehrenberger: I recently was a mentor at a summer camp for teens interested in film. Not only did I get to help out on set, but was also asked to be an actor in their films. I was absolutely petrified but am so happy my face wasn’t shown on screen.

Evan Pricco: I think the Internet is sort of broken, and it’s really hard to find things that you want to find. It’s its own consciousness, so I exercise caution. I’ve sort of given up there. I just buy a lot of books, and even if I don’t flip through them everyday, they just remind me of being in a place, when I bought it, why I bought it, the physicality of the thing, the words that are in it. I love the touch and feel of a good book. 

Akiko Stehrenberger: Tom Cruise’s real height.

Phil Chang: I had a…quantity of dogecoin in 2013 when it was still a Reddit joke and people were just copping to get the shiba meme and “to the moon!” on Josh Wise’s NASCAR livery. Then that giant hack happened (what else is new; it’s crypto) at the end of that year and I lost it all. A scale model of the NASCAR itself sits on my bedroom Vitsoe on that Citizen Kane Rosebud shit. I don’t know. Does that count? Where’s my 2013 dogecoin? Have I looked up what it might be worth in 2025? Hahahaha!!!! Do I want to talk about it? Hahahaha!!!!

Akiko Stehrenberger: Can someone please explain to me why lip syncing on tiktok became and still is a thing? 

Evan Pricco: I think there is too much art writing space given to the “art world” and “art market” as opposed to the actual artists who make the work. Most things you read are about the infrastructure of art, all the bad things about the art world, all the budget cuts, bad directors, bad institutions; which have existed and will exist for eternity because you can nitpick the art world so easily. I do think we need some of it, but it can’t be the majority of it. We have stopped writing about artists and creatives, and when we do, it feels like a pay to play. Too much of the artist profiles feel safe, paid for, stale. It all seems to be playing into the hands of particularly aggressive forms of censorship. Like it’s feeding this beast that is trying to eliminate the infrastructure of art and making art really safe. And artists are not stale. They have things to say. I miss when reading a profile on an artist felt risqué, historic, edgy, and a little dangerous. I want a little more history and edge now. 

My second hot take is that too many people are curators or call themselves curators and I think we can slightly look at how much social media has made curating a more passive occupation than it used to be. I really think the role of a curator is important, should be really considered, and I think we are over-using the terms because it sounds sexy and it feeds the Pinterest-board world we live in. 

Phil Chang: I don’t have a hot take for you…but my room-temperature observation is that most “hot takes” on social media are about as hot as the “ironies” in Alanis’ “Ironic” are ironic. Hardbody hot takes are only being platformed in group chats of 6 people or less.

James Jean: A pair of colored pencil drawings by Yoshitomo Nara. He offered them to me when I visited him in Hokkaido over the summer a few years ago. As a trade, I did a painting for him when I returned to LA. The next summer, I discovered that he had put my painting up in N’s Yard, his museum in Nasu. I was so honored.

Akiko Stehrenberger: I have a sculpture by Javier Jaén. It’s Michelangelo’s “David” but most of him is not yet carved out of a block of marble. Legend suggests that Michelangelo, when he received the block of marble to sculpt the famous statue, believed to see the figure of David already present within that stone block. I love how Jaén’s versatility allows him to execute such clever and seemingly endless ideas.

Evan Pricco: We have these really fantastic watercolors by the Spanish artist Escif, who is both a friend and one of my favorite artists in the world. He came from working in the street but has this really conceptual form that is really unique. The works we have are collaborations with his son. I just love that there is the mix of realism, activism and fine art with the innocence of youth all in one. It feels like a story of mark-making through life, the son of a graffiti artist scribbling over his now-fine artist father. It’s a brilliant reminder everyday. Barry McGee told me recently, “Art should be fun and uncomplicated.” That is correct.

Phil Chang: I’d have to pick “The Editor” by James Jean. James and I worked on this piece together back in 2018. It was for C47’s first project, which was a magazine about cinema for Netflix (this project still kinda exists as a publication they call Queue, but it bears no resemblance to what we developed for them all those years ago). Netflix wanted to ingratiate itself with legendary directors and producers who felt it was undermining the art form, so we wanted our cover to immediately show our intended audience that the company understood and respected what goes into making a film. As such, we ditched the typical, PR-sanctioned-and-sanitized-portrait-of-a-celebrity route. Instead, we paid tribute to below-the-line crew members, esp. editors, who play crucial roles in bringing a film together (if you’ve ever been on any kind of shoot, you know it all happens in the edit) while never receiving the shine they deserve. There are two versions of “The Editor”—night and day—a testament to how relentless the post process is. James did a characteristically masterful job in lending the editor’s responsibilities literal form…you can see her assiduously pruning leaves inset with eyes from the main stem of a film, enabling only the best ideas to mightily flower and bloom.