BunnyMan's Special Power Is Kindness
It’s February and shit is different, obviously, but it’s still fucking cold downtown. Riptides of ice-rough wind careen against the Open Studio’s wall-to-wall windows, the eighth floor of Columbia College insulated only with the frenzied warmth an art studio emits. It’s Don, sitting at a wooden table, his stack of Priority Mail stickers drawn on with colorful characters and signed ‘REDMEN,’ soon to be slapped onto bus stop signs and parking garage mirrors, or mailed to paying customers, or given away for free in his Instagram raffles. It’s not the ideal day to wade through Chicago sub-zero, but when you grind every day there’s no such thing as ideal days, just opportunities to advance your art, and grow your brand, and make your message something all the more special.
It’s his Jordan Year, a fresh 23 years old, Dontay Lockett aka Don Orphan, and like Michael, he’s always on the chase for something great. When I first met Don, a few months before this, he was rocking a Flyboy sweater and raving about Hebru Brantley’s Nevermore Park with that type of artist’s admiration – when seeing another’s art inspires you to make your own. And in June, a few months after our chat, he graduated from Columbia with a degree in Illustration, though it's hardly Don’s only domain: he works in music, photography, graphic novels, painting, embroidery, clay, and any other material mashup that inspires notes and mockups in his thick paper sketchbook. It’s like an infinity of art, this book, all his past, present, and future plans lain bare on the page.
Don’s holding this sketchbook like it’s a baby. We’re sitting in as quiet a nook as you can find in a bustling art school, squished between abstract orange furniture and vending machines. He’s just gotten out of class, but Don’s hardly got that post-lecture haze in his eyes. Turning to page one, he starts talking with thoughtful reverence about RedMen, his fashion brand that’s more than just fashion, that challenges racist stereotypes, that balances the hyper-real with the fantastic, that confronts toxic masculinity. That started accidentally: making a mood board for a comic book, he only had black and red markers. He began drawing characters in these two colors, starting with lips and hair.
“I know there’s a joke that Black people have big lips, and I wanted to flip that into a good thing,” Don says. “So I emphasized Black features even more. Big lips, big nose, bushy hair, wild hair. Dreads sticking out everywhere. I don’t know, for some reason I wanted to call it RedMen.”
And RedMen it was, the characters evolving to take pride in and ownership of the features often belittled in racist Black caricatures. No longer were they different, “but simply a part of the majority,” writes Don on his website. But Don was still reconciling his message on masculinity, the ‘Men’ of RedMen, when he met his now-girlfriend, Vaishnavi Paudel, a talented make-up artist and creative herself. Says Don, she helped him wrap his head around a balance of masculinity and femininity, and reconsider traditional gender roles.
When Don became a ‘face’ for Vaishnavi –– a term he’s learned, he tells me, for someone who models for a makeup artist –– he started seeing nail polish and makeup as expressive, another element of fashion. And these perspective changes, and new scenarios, helped Don flush out RedMen.
“I’m a creator. I should get in tune with my masculine and feminine sides, and be a little more feminine, and be open to certain things that I guess some males wouldn’t be,” says Don. “And that wrapped around into, ‘let’s make it a brand.’”
So Don launched RedMen fashion in August 2019, his first drop complete with t-shirts, hats, vests, and totes. And staying true to its mood board and comic book inception, everything is about character: graphic novel-type boxes and scenes prominently adorn his clothing, popping with red and black color schemes. Don’s first graphics were of Black men screaming wordlessly into open air, their message subject to the interpretation of the wearer. It’s a pillar of the brand’s identity, to know that you’re wearing RedMen for a purpose, to own it and know it. It’s not about clout, or doing something to fit in, or worst of all, passive engagement.
“RedMen is a world where women wield boxing gloves and black people pose in iconic photos,” writes Don. “But most importantly, all of the characters in RedMen are able to struggle with their own insecurities and struggles aside from the consequences of systemic oppression.”
Before Columbia, Don spent close to five years homeless with his mom, sister, and nephew. They couch-surfed and lived in shelters and hotels. At a certain point, it wasn’t about needing money, says Don, it was about needing a new life. When times got really tough, it was art that helped him through. His recurring cast of RedMen characters each carry backstories and pieces of Don’s own life, and as he flips through his sketchbook, showing me their evolution and potential future plans, he talks about them like he would a friend. Don points to a heart, personified with eyes and big lips, that makes an appearance in the background of most of his graphics.
“The Heart is a character,” he says. “It’s self-love. I would draw Hearts coming out of me. Sometimes they’d be broken.”
But if any one character reflects Don the most, it’s Bunnyman. With “Gummo”-esque pink rabbit ears, he’s his own brand and identity –– so much so that Don likes to keep him separate from the RedMen universe. When there is crossover, it’s a BunnyMan x RedMen collab. Don turns a big chunk of pages in his sketchbook, revealing his most recent work: the outline of a BunnyMan comic book. Spoilers here are withheld, but BunnyMan’s special power is kindness –– “he just finds any and every way to help someone,” Don says. In the first physical creation of the BunnyMan hat, which dropped this summer, Don added a detail that doesn’t appear in BunnyMan drawings: an embroidered smile that sits patched between the ears.
Don hopes to make enough money off his upcoming drops to start a charity. He wants to help the shelters where he lived a good part of his life in Chicago, and fund that creative itch for kids who are in situations similar to his. He gestures to his sketchbook: “This is my community,” he says, again and again throughout our conversation, referring to RedMen, their messages of Black excellence and resilience, and his lived communities of family, friends, and neighbors.
“This guy, he’s supposed to be a clown,” says Don, angling a new sketch towards me after a pause in our conversation. “When I made this character, I thought about how my community is not really taken seriously. They’re seen as a joke.”
Don’s created new graphics and artwork in recent months, reflective of both a summer of protests and generations of racism. Titles including “Cry4Help,” “MY STRUGGLE,” “ME NO STEREOTYPE,” and “DONATE” combine new characters and messages that seem political but shouldn’t be. As Don says, his art is about progress and inclusion. That masculine and feminine balance. That all Black lives more than matter, that they’re loved and needed.
“I can only treat my message that comes across,” he says. “It’s for everybody willing to put all the negatives to the side, and be as one.”
Don’s got two big drops on the horizon: The Heart Project, which celebrates the character motif’s range of emotion and cerebral connection; and an introspective mixtape, Era of a Homebody. This dual release represents Don’s personal and artistic growth so far. “This brand is not for you to just wear but also for you to become one with yourself,” he writes in the RedMen (@redmenco) Instagram bio. Don is becoming one with himself.
Back in the Open Studio, we’re looking out at a freezing Chicago. Taped to one of the windows is an outline of the Sears Tower, and if you stand in a certain spot, from a certain distance, the skyscraper fits perfectly within the lines. Don sticks a Priority Mail sticker on an adjacent wall, something he’s been meaning to do in the place where he spends hours working nearly every day. It’s the Heart that’s drawn on the sticker, smiling with a quiet sort of kindness.
Don joins me and takes in the view, that same kind smile growing across his face. His sketchbook is closed and in his bag now, and I’ve got a BunnyMan sticker of my own, a gift from the BunnyMan himself. And when at last we emerge in the winter air, Don heads for home, carrying the world of RedMen on his back, and kindness in his heart.