Sam Spratt is a New York-based artist,who paints Luci, an ongoing narrative of digital paintings minted on Ethereumbeginning in October 2021.Before turning to the blockchain, he made artwork for other people's projects across music, film, television, video games and comics.Luci follows a story of pilgrimage that Spratt has called “a refracted self-portrait”.,
The first chapter, Birth of Luci, grew out of a period in Brooklyn when Spratt said he had lost love, friendship and his sense of self, prompting him to start over.Luci is described as art that comes “from rupture”, a pursuit of redemption that charts a path forward from past missteps.A chapter of Luci was later auctioned at Christie's.
In 2023, Spratt released The Monument Game, the ninth chapter of Luci, on Nifty Gateway.,The painting became a multiplayer arena in which 256 collectors carved love letters, riddles and even ASCII vandalism directly onto the image.A profile added to a later trade edition of the book On NFTs highlighted his practice as an example of “the collector as collaborator”.
Spratt's tenth chapter, Masquerade, debuted in 2025, continuing the story from where The Monument Game left off with new narratives, new Masks of Luci and a new interactive structure.For Masquerade, Spratt worked with Nifty Gateway to build his own generative AI engine, trained on his archive of digital paintings down to the brushstroke, which he used to test compositions for his large-scale paintings.After the piece sold, he gave away 613 of the resulting Masks of Luci editions to collectors and contributors who had supported his work over the years.
Masquerade and Masks of Luci were shown in “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms” at the Toledo Museum of Art in 2025, Spratt's first exhibition in a major US museum, with his work given its own gallery within the show.,,During a panel discussion there, his AI process for the show was described as cloning his own hand into “a virtual atelier of skilled assistants”, extending his control over the image rather than ceding it to algorithmic randomness as other artists in the show did.In a group discussion with the exhibition's curator and four other participating artists, Spratt said building a personal system out of his own painting practice let him “get to know myself and see how much of my own humanity can live in a system”.
