Ben and Bobby first met Amir H. Fallah back in the early days of The Hundreds at the Magic trade show in Vegas. In those days, Amir was running Beautiful Decay, the art and lifestyle magazine he founded in high school and turned into a flourishing platform for art, clothing, music, and more.

Though the two sides admired each other’s work greatly and their paths crossed often, a collaboration never materialized. Until now. As part of our Artist Series Bandanas release, The Hundreds and Amir H. Fallah are finally working on a project together, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Artist Series Bandanas are very close to our hearts because they allowed us to connect with some of our greatest artist friends in a time when the world was pulling everyone so far apart. This collaboration not only allowed us to amplify the work of some of our absolute favorite creators but also give back to the causes they care most about.

Fallah will donate a portion of the profits from the Artist Series Bandanas to the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that has fought for our Constitutional rights as Americans since the first World War. All of us. No matter what.

At first glance, there seems to be a lot going on within Amir’s painting that we featured on the Bandana, and there is, but it’s all connected and part of the story.

“It’s about being a father,” said Fallah on a Zoom call from his studio. “I have a young kid, he’s five-years-old, and I started thinking about what my wife and I would do if a truck hit us both tomorrow and we disappeared.”

Heavy stuff, but what I assume is a very real concern for many parents. So Amir began reading children’s stories to his son that contained parables and lessons he wanted to pass on.

“If you have a book about sharing, you’re teaching your kid to play nice with others,” he told me. “We have a book about multiracial families because we’re a multiracial family.”

“Before I had a kid, I thought that children’s books were just a form of entertainment. And then once I had a kid, I realized these were ways to pass on our beliefs, our knowledge, and how we view the world.”

The painting on the Bandana is part of a larger body of work that deals with these ideas. Each of the paintings starts with a line of text, this piece beginning with “No Gods, No Masters.”

“It can be read many different ways,” said Fallah. “It’s actually an Anarchist chant from protests. But you can think of it as Gods and masters in a literal sense or your job being your master. It’s really about being your own person and not letting those around you influence or manipulate who you are.”

Each of the four quadrants of the painting speaks to elements of Fallah’s background or to these themes directly. As an Iranian American, Amir has been teased from the time he was a kid about his heritage. People would mockingly ask if he flew on magic carpets or if his dad wore a turban, ignorant of the true history of his people.

“So, there’s a very stereotypical image of what people in the Middle East look like,” he explained. “And then it’s coupled with a NASA logo, which is a very American thing. When Ben [Hundreds] was over, I was jokingly saying I think of the guys on the magic carpet as the Iranian NASA.”

Fallah is taking back ownership of the stereotypes that people have painted him with his whole life, while also poking fun at them in his own painting.

One of the other sections of the painting features a silhouette of a human nervous system, which harkens back to a running theme in the series of works on paper Amir has been painting during the pandemic.

“My son, for whatever reason, became obsessed with human anatomy,” he said. “He knows more than most high school kids about how the body works. He’s five and he doesn’t know how to read or write but he can tell you about every organ and how it works.”

This study of what’s on the inside of us is important, especially in the context of these paintings that explore cultural differences and racial bias.

“When you take the skin off, everybody looks the same underneath,” Fallah said. “He’s going into life learning about the insides of people rather than focusing on the outside.”

We can all learn a lot from Amir’s son.