A Man of Many Hats: Ajai Kasim by Nicola Verani

Ajai Kasim. Designer. Musician. Rapper. Singer. Milliner. He has his introduction well rehearsed. 

For Ajai Kasim, music and visual art have been present in his life from the beginning. Born and raised by poets in West Oakland, he credits them for why he finds himself in this position today. Especially his mother, he said, “everything that she did I kind of absorbed, and took in and kind of regurgitated in my own way.” Kasim elaborated, “I started off doing poetry, like my parents, and those poems turned into raps”. He started rapping at 13 and found his way in music with help from fellow Oakland artists like JWalt, Zo1Love, Alonzo, and Obasi. He expresses gratitude to these friends, who he considers like brothers to him. 

The love Kasim receives from his community back home is unmatched, and in New York his biggest collaborators are still people that he grew up with in Oakland. One of his oldest friends and collaborators is M’Kai Joseph, Kai the Universe. Kasim and Joseph grew up together in a community of artists that their parents had created, “they met doing all the same poetry… so that's what we're of, like building communities like that. You know, we all grew up together and all these things. I want to just continue to push that off of love, off of love of art, off of love for each other.” It was these same goals of building an artist community like their parents that pushed the artists to host “Kai and Jai’s Twisted Universe” in Brooklyn on August 22nd at AMPM Galleries. The event included performances from other Black artists across genres and the crowd that showed up included many friends from Oakland. “The real goal here is to gain more believers. More people that the work resonates with and that we can build it with and build community with.”

While Kasim has been working a lot on his music, he is not neglecting his career in fashion deisgn. He has his own brand called Children of the Urf and he works as an associate designer for Brooklyn Circus. He attended Oakland School for the Arts where he studied visual arts until the 11th grade when he switched to fashion design. “OSA was a big part of me finding myself,” he says, “I really realized I wanted to do [art] on a more professional scale when I switched to fashion design”. He moved to New York to continue studying fashion design at Parsons, recently graduating with the class of 2024. He claims that although he was not the best student on paper during his time at Parsons, his growth and relationships built there proved otherwise. In New York, he found new inspiration, “Greta has inspired me a lot. She's definitely helped me expand my perspective just on fashion. She's made me fall more in love with it”. Margaret Millette (or Greta) accompanied Kasim to our photoshoot and asked to sketch fashion drawings of him in the outfits that he styled for the shoot. It was a happy surprise and demonstration of the artistic community that Kasim surrounds himself with. 

On some projects, his fashion and his music collide. His senior thesis show was entitled “From Spirit to Man” and he has an upcoming album under the same name made with his friend and producer ClayDough (together the duo refers to themselves as NepGoons). Clay Terry, ClayDough, is another Oakland based artist and Kasim’s biggest collaborator. They just released their album Goons Gonna Getch Ya and had a show in Oakland while Kasim was visiting. The show reaffirmed for the duo that they were creating art that their community would respond well to. He said, “putting out the music is what we need to be doing more consistently because we have a lot of content, but we're not always consistently dropping new stuff. And this told us like, yo, if we just put out the music. The people that we want to collaborate with, all the opportunities that we're looking for, will start naturally coming our way”. In their upcoming album, From Spirit to Man, Kasim and Terry have sampled from a youth group that Kasim was a part of called Young, Gifted, & Black. The group “does hip hop and poetry about Black history” and travels the Bay Area and Africa teaching Black history to youth. In this next album, he aims to represent this special community that he grew up in and give back to the community by representing them and being an inspiration for the next generation of kids like himself. Kasim is forging a path for himself as an artist, just as his parents’ generation and friends did for themselves, and positioning himself as the next big brother to younger artists by building his own artist community. 

Follow Ajai Kasim @twisted.cant.fix.it to see his work & latest projects