They called him a super predator.
He put it on a shoe and sold it.
Reason. Halim A. Flowers started selling drugs at twelve years old because his sneakers were dirty. He says it plainly in the registration testimony, and it is the single most important sentence in this file: “My self-esteem was placed into my ability to wear new sneakers instead of just in my ability to be myself.” Thirty years later — after a life sentence, after twenty-two years inside, after coming home in 2019 — the first product he ever designed was a sneaker. This asset is not a graphic that happens to sit on footwear. It is the closing of a specific loop, from the object that pulled a child into the street economy to the object he now owns the design of outright.
The design. A photographic skull, hand-overdrawn in acid green, white and black. Across the crown: THREE STRIKE LIFE, split by a lightning fracture. In the eye sockets, where sight would be: SUPER / PREDATOR. Inside the mouth, in the place the tongue would sit, the word INC — the originator's note in testimony is that the ink is inside the mouth, the language is the weapon and the incorporation both. Below the jaw, a bow tie and collar: MENACE TO MILLIONAIRE. Running up the left edge of the master file: PAIN TO PROSPERITY PIPELINE. Read top to bottom, the object is a sentence: the law names you, the academy names you, and then you name yourself.
What the labels were. Both are documented public record, not artistic invention. The federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 carried a three-strikes provision, and more than half the states passed their own versions; in the broadest of them a third qualifying felony — including non-violent offenses — could return a sentence of twenty-five years to life. The word in the eye sockets came from a 1995 essay by John J. DiIulio Jr., then a professor at Princeton, forecasting a coming generation of juvenile “super-predators.” The forecast was wrong; juvenile crime fell. DiIulio himself publicly repudiated it, and by 2012 he had joined an amicus brief against the juvenile life-without-parole sentences the theory had helped justify. Flowers was sentenced under that climate as a child. The design takes a discredited academic term and a sentencing statute and wears them as tattoos.
How it was made. The chain is short and it is unusual. In December 2021 Flowers was at Art Basel Miami — his first — where he met John Burbank, the venture investor and Golden State Warriors co-owner who had become his first collector. Burbank's framing, quoted in testimony: “I don't see you as an artist. I see you as a startup, like a founder of a startup—and I want to invest in you like that.” Burbank introduced him to FLYP, then a pre-launch fashion-design app built by two founders in London, whose stated premise was that a kid with Virgil Abloh's talent in a village anywhere should be able to design on a phone and have it manufactured on demand. FLYP's founders told him to buy an iPad and install Procreate. He did, in December 2021. This design is what came off it — and per the originator, he was the first artist FLYP ever collaborated with.
Creation window, corrected. The recorded testimony opens with a garbled date range and later settles firmly on 2022, corroborated internally: he describes being home “three years” at the time of the design, and he came home in 2019. The iPad and the Procreate license were acquired in December 2021 and the work cannot pre-date the tool it was drawn with. The registry window is recorded as December 2021 – 2022, with 2022 as the originator's stated year of the finished design.
Edition and custody. Ten pairs were manufactured and all ten were collected. The originator retains the original digital design file and the first sneaker manufactured. Production ran through the FLYP app and FLYP's contracted manufacturers on a made-to-order basis. Reproduction control therefore sits with the originator at the file level — subject entirely to §06, which is about who else may hold a copy of that file.
Rights. This is the cleanest title in the pilot and it deserves to be said first. Per the originator: no brand deal, no licensing agreement, no IP usage of any kind, and no third-party elements, logos, or designs inside the artwork. Where Asset 03 sits on top of somebody else's newspaper page and two other artists' copyrights, this one sits on nothing but its own drawing. The open questions here are not about what is underneath the art. They are about the platform the art was uploaded to and the blank it was printed on. §06 treats both.
Intended use. Narrow and stated: use permitted only for educational purposes in alignment with Artonomics initiatives to support creatives through business education, with the sole additional case being loan of the design or the sneaker to an arts and culture institution for those same purposes. No commercial footwear licensing is sought. §05 prices that surface.
Ten pairs is not a production run. It is a proof of principle — that the child who sold to buy sneakers can end up owning the design equity in one.
Unlike Asset 03, the exhibits on this brief reproduce no third-party material and carry no clearance constraint. Subject to the §06 platform-terms review, these images are the pilot's first that can be used freely in artist-facing and buyer-facing communication. Attribution: SUPERPREDATOR (Menace to Millionaire), Halim A. Flowers, 2022.
| Registry Field | Value |
|---|---|
| TICKER | $HALIM · parent property · artist name PAY A10$ION |
| ASSET | “My First Sneaker Design” — SUPERPREDATOR (Menace to Millionaire) · Asset 04 of 06 · design + produced edition registered together |
| CLASS | Applied Art / Product Design — original digital drawing applied to manufactured footwear |
| MEDIUM | Digital design, Procreate on iPad · printed to low-top sneaker · black, green, white |
| SECTOR | Fashion / Footwear (CDC 3.5×) |
| EDITION | 10 pairs manufactured · 10 pairs collected · full sell-through · artist retains pair 1/10 and the master file |
| ORIGIN | December 2021 – 2022 · designed in Procreate on an iPad acquired December 2021 after Art Basel Miami · first product design by the originator |
| PRODUCTION | FLYP app and FLYP-contracted manufacturers · made-to-order · originator represents he was FLYP's first artist collaborator |
| CUSTODY | Original digital design file and sneaker 1/10 held by the originator · nine pairs with ten named-unknown collectors |
| STAGE | Day-0 · Registered on ledger · produced and sold once · not currently offered |
| STATUS | Registered · underlying artwork clean · platform terms and edition record unverified |
| PRIOR RIGHTS | None granted per originator. No brand deal, licensing, or IP usage of any kind. No third-party elements, logos, or designs in the artwork. |