We met in Charleston, SC in 2014.
McKenzie had just moved back to South Carolina from New York City, where she ran BluRoc Records, wrote and recorded original music, and toured – including a sixty-city tour with MURS and Tabi Bonney.
Looking for a change from the music industry and to be closer to family, in 2013 she opened King Dusko – an eclectic art gallery/coffee shop/music venue on Charleston’s King St., a popular area for bars and nightlife. The space quickly became a home for the local art scene, where she got to know many local artists and musicians.
One of those artists was Elliott. Elliott has been illustrating and painting murals since he was a teenager growing up on Edisto Island. He has worked as a visual artist since 2006, when he started a nautical design and illustration company, which he operated for eleven years. He also shared a musical connection with McKenzie, having toured, recorded, and performed with his band in his twenties.
McKenzie & Elliott Creative, LLC
After meeting, it didn’t take long for us to realize we could make a living working together creatively. We formed McKenzie & Elliott Creative, LLC and started down a new path together.
The work started with music, as we began performing at local venues. That led to songwriting and a couple of original singles, Ode to Earthlings and Stingray.
In 2017, we collaborated on our first mural project. It was ambitious – a 600 ft. long, 8,000 sq. ft. mural in Houston. We’ve grown our business organically since then, and have designed and installed over 30 murals together. In 2020, we also began creating custom wall art out of our studio in Charleston.
New York
In the summer of 2022, we began to feel a pull to be somewhere new (as artists often do) and were ready to embrace radical change (as artists often are); so we began searching for a new home base for our studio.
The Hudson Valley was one of the first places we visited. We fell in love with the people, and the nature, and the feeling of having magnetic feet while hiking alongside mountain streams. The area kept calling us back, and felt like home to us long before it was.
In the summer of 2023 we opened our new studio space at the foot of the Catskills in Woodstock, NY. From here, we dream up mural designs, and also create custom wall art. The work created in our studio is available online for purchase and can be picked up from us directly or shipped to you.
Creative Community Work
In addition to visual art, early on we discovered a love for producing unique community projects. From 2014 through 2015, we produced several civic engagement events leading up to the city’s election of the first new mayor in (astonishingly) 40 years, including a voter registration drive and community concert with non-profit BACE League, a mayoral forum addressing service industry workers’ issues, and an original civic engagement art performance for (now former) Charleston poet laureate Marcus Amaker’s Free Verse Poetry Festival.
Music led to some profound community experiences while living in Charleston. We were humbled and inspired to help organize Hi Harmony, a free concert sponsored by local art institutions and businesses that brought the community together for an evening of music and truth-telling in the wake of tragedy.
From this event, the music project Very Hypnotic Soul Band was formed.
This brought us to work with artist and activist Benny Starr. Along with other Charleston musicians, we performed under the name Very Hypnotic for community events, Spoleto, and Pecha Kucha. In 2016, the group recorded an EP together.
In 2018, Very Hypnotic went on to produce and direct a moment in Charleston history: Benny Starr’s A Water Album – a live-recorded performance of Charleston’s first-ever local hip hop artist to headline - and nearly sell out - a major venue.
In one of our last projects before leaving Charleston, we were honored to help manifest a different kind of historic moment for our good friend, the late Emily H. Meggett - New York Times Bestseller Gullah Geechee Home Cooking.