Vinnie Hager is an artist who creates networks of repeating patterns and symbols spanning drawing, painting and digital media.His bold-lined, densely patterned work mimics the sprawl of online life and touches on identity, memory and connection.,He grew up in Severna Park, Maryland, studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and works between Baltimore and Los Angeles.,,
Hager began posting his art on Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic and discovered the NFT and web3 space through the response it drew.In October 2021 he released Letters, 1,000 hand-drawn digital works on Ethereum based on the envelope symbol as a stand-in for communication and exchange.He has also painted large public murals, including a Times Square billboard for Nasdaq and the Exelon Building mural for Beatty Development in Baltimore, both in 2021, and OpenSea's New York office mural in 2023.,For the OpenSea mural he began with a single envelope shape and let it grow more complex across the wall in real time, incorporating the OpenSea logo and crypto imagery as he worked.
In August 2023 he released Diary, a generative series of 3,093 works drawn from 100 pieces he made over six years while grieving the deaths of both his parents and his brother. The 100 source drawings were sorted into twelve stylistic categories and combined with varying color palettes so that each mint generated a unique piece, with physical prints of the originals later claimable by collectors.,He has described drawing as a therapeutic anchor that carried him through that period.In June 2024 he released Still Life, 200 works pairing analog drawing with digital compression and inscribing them on Bitcoin via the Ordinals protocol, using rare sats tied to the network's earliest blocks.Later that year his work Handle with Care won an open call by the artist Erick Calderon to reinterpret his Chromie Squiggle, chosen from 192 entries. The piece entered the Christie's auction “Bridging Worlds: Digital Art Beyond Borders”, held for the UN Refugee Agency around the 2024 Venice Biennale's theme of foreigners everywhere.
