Tyler Thrasher Is Not Afraid Of Glowing Up 

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Table of Contents:
Part I: Air
Part II: Water
Part III: Fire
Part IV: Earth

Part I: Air

And when I was born, I drew in the common air, and fell upon the earth, which is of like nature, and the first voice which I uttered was crying, as all others do.
-Wisdom of Solomon, 7:3 

“Did you guys hear about the astronauts who are stuck in space?” Tyler Thrasher asks, his deep voice echoing through Materia, his Tulsa shop, filled with crystallized insects and glow-in-the-dark flowers. “They got hit with debris, and now they’re stuck in space.” 

The shop is just over a week open, and Thrasher—tall and broad at 32, his pink-dyed curls bouncing, big smile—has the energy of a new parent, fussing over this rack of cicadas, that presentation of roses. I catch him in the afternoon, on a warm, sunny day in early November, when the shop is, miraculously, empty except for a few employees. It’s a far cry from the store’s opening day, when around a thousand people wound their way around Admiral Boulevard to get inside. It’s abnormally quiet. It feels right that Thrasher immediately starts talking about space rocks, as he’s probably one of the most famous people in rocks right now. 

Ever since Thrasher dipped a cicada shell into a vat of crystallizing liquid (no, he won’t tell you his recipe), his life—artistic, digital, material, the whole shebang—has exploded. His hundreds of thousands of online followers from across the world, and their zeal for getting their hands on his next creation, attest to the newness and creativity of his work, which combines chemistry, zoology, and fine art, all wrapped up in a visual product that you’ve almost certainly never seen the likes of before.

What exactly is crystallization? I ask. I watch Thrasher’s brain shifting gears as he talks to me about it, attempting to explain it in a way a small child might understand (as it’s obvious that I don’t). It has a lot more to do with water than you’d think, he says. A crystallizing object is submerged in a solution which includes water, and over time the water evaporates, leaving only the ions behind. Once that water is gone, there’s nothing to stop the ions from binding to the surface of whatever you’re trying to crystallize. 

By the time Thrasher found himself immersed in the science of crystallization—and reaping the benefits of applying an artistic process to it—he had undergone his own form of chemical change: from a reserved kid, isolated by religion and race, to a father, a business owner, a fixture of his community, a mental health advocate, and an artist on a global stage. 

Thrasher grew up in Swan Lake. Even in a Midtown neighborhood for Tulsa’s well-to-do, he, his white father, his black mother, and his three siblings were isolated. Dad had wanted to be a preacher, but when that didn’t work, he became a landscaper, but the religious impulse never went away. At home, religion was a tool of fear, keeping others away, and keeping the family inside. At school, Thrasher was too white for the black kids, too black for the white kids. As he puts it: “Being biracial is a whole thing.

“It’s this no-man’s land,” he says. “People want to put you somewhere. I was just black enough to be called the n-word by family, peers, teachers. I had white family that would say, ‘you’re acting like a dumb n*****.’ And I’m a kid. I heard it a lot, too, because I liked basketball shorts, because I liked to run, god forbid. 

“So I was black enough to be called that, but not black enough to actually hang out with the black kids. So it was me and my two biracial friends in middle school. We weren’t allowed to go anywhere else.” 

Not feeling welcome in so many places, he would spend his free time in his father’s intricate garden, with multiple ponds that wrapped around the big blue house. Thrasher would get down on the ground level with his action figures, where the plants were transformed into dense jungles. The toys would become embroiled in stories, which paused only when he had to go to bed or school. He’d spend all day and night thinking about the stories, and pick them back up as soon as he was back in those gardens. It was, as he puts it, a coping mechanism, to distract from “what was happening” in the household. 

He’ll hint at this, what it means. He’ll talk about mental illness, and how it impacted his parents, and how that impacted him and his siblings, with varying degrees of specificity. Mostly, he shields this area of his childhood from view, not wanting to disrupt a family for which he obviously has a lot of empathy. But growing up, he was angry about something. 

“A lot of my friends, we'd all just take these big walks and talk about what our home lives were like, and I just had so much rage [about mine],” he says. At the same time—and perhaps because of this—he was beginning to demonstrate a high degree of sensitivity to the people around him: “I was the kid that would pluck my dad's flowers and leaves and make potions, and we would pretend that they'd give my siblings magical powers. I used a lot of this as distractions for me and my siblings from what was happening in our home. So I go to high school, and I already have this natural inclination toward creativity, imagination, and not denying myself that sort of escape.” 

Anime became one such escape. He came home to watch Cowboy Bebop on Toonami, stayed up watching Adult Swim, developing an obsession with the style. He started sketching out his own creations in the hallway at Booker T. Washington High School. One day, he remembers, he was sketching in that same hallway, and an art teacher, Jennifer Brown, called out to him: “You are taking my class next semester.” 

Around the same time, he found that chemistry held a certain appeal for him. When he mentioned his desire to take AP Chemistry to a high school girlfriend, she told him that he wasn’t smart enough to take it. Well! That lit a bunsen burner inside him: he took the class, and the relationship ended almost immediately. 

“I'm a very bullheaded person,” he says. “I've had a few times where people tell me I can't do something. And I'm like, fuck you, I'm gonna do it. That was my attitude. And at first it was just me trying to prove that I was smart enough. And I learned that it's not that easy, and I actually had to try. And from there, I just fell in love with it.” 

Chemistry rewrote how he viewed the world. Growing up in what he calls “a religious and fearful household,” Thrasher experienced a lot of doomsday prophecy: Jesus might come back at any minute. He threw all that fear into this chemistry class, asking: Are any of these components concerned with the second coming of Christ? Well, turns out: no. Everything, he realized, could be broken down into components—“and none of those components believed in God. And once [I accepted] that, it kind of rewrote how I viewed everything. I remember having this huge existential crisis in the middle of my AP Chemistry test period season where I was just like, oh, my God, this is all meaningless. Chemistry was incredibly pivotal for how I was gonna view life or my even little existence in it.”

That’s around the time he met Molly Thompson. He was playing Rock Band at a friend’s place around 2009, and when he looked over, she was there. He couldn’t stop wailing on those drums, though, so he settled for sending her a message on MySpace. From then on, they were best friends, talking on the phone every night.

She introduced him to her family, who ate dinner together every night, something he was shocked by. Everyone sat down with each other, looked each other in the eyes—laughed with each other? Thrasher was out of his element: “I was like, this is all so foreign.” 

They stayed together even while Thrasher went off to college at Missouri State University, studying Japanese and animation, aiming to be a Japanese anime-style animator. But as we all know, experiments can often go sideways. For Thrasher, an experiment in education took him underground. 

Part II: Water

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
-W. H. Auden

In Thrasher’s lab, buckets and fishtanks full of chemical solutions hold animal skeletons, cicada shells, even snails. Water holds the key to crystallization; take away water in the form of evaporation, and the ions in the solution bind to whatever’s around, creating crystals. And none of it might ever have happened if not for the caves of southwestern Missouri. 

Here, at MSU, we see the first origins of Thrasher-as-mad-scientist. Missouri is full of caves, and Thrasher, bored and frustrated with Japanese and animation in his sophomore year, went on a lark on a caving expedition to Skylight Cave, just outside Springfield. “I was itching for anything different, and there’s not much more different than crawling through a dark, muddy hole, dodging bats and salamanders,” he told Art Affairs podcast in 2020. 

Something about the cave spoke to him: its age, maybe, or its multitude of strange plants and animals, obsessed him. Over the rest of his college experience, he spent most weekends exploring caves, thinking about caves, or researching caves. He would finish the degree in Japanese and animation, but caves gave him his real education. Seeing gypsum crystals and million-year-old stalactites gave him a sense of awe and inspiration that he was failing to receive from his university studies. He was spending more time in caves than on his schoolwork. 

But even in those classes, he was finding ways to nurse his obsession. He would draw crystals in his spare time, to the extent that his animation professors noticed, and encouraged him to animate them. Thrasher found his mind dreaming up crystal-covered bugs—an obvious conclusion, from a newly-found crystal obsession and a youth spent in gardens—and, trying to find any examples of crystalized insects on the internet, came up short. 

He knew, from those chemistry classes, that crystals were not just things found in nature; they were things you could create. So in 2014, his final year of college, he went to Home Depot, bought what he needed to make a crystal, and tossed it into a vat in his kitchen, along with a cicada shell he had found in his backyard. 

The next morning, there were small copper sulfate crystals growing out of the shell of the cicada. “I said, ‘This is the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,’” he says. “It just blew my mind. I had never seen anything like it.” He had merely imagined it. 

And it surpassed his—and, it seems, everyone else’s—imagination. People loved them, wanted them for their own collections. Within a few months, he says, he was growing dozens of crystalized cicada shells at a time and mailing them to total strangers—as a full-time job.

“This is why I tell people: shoot your shot,” he says. 

It’s very nearly his life motto. An artist who Thrasher admired, J.A.W. Cooper, had inspired him from afar with her detailed drawing of cicadas. One day soon after the cicada shells, Thrasher sent Cooper a DM on Facebook, offering to trade a crystallized cicada for a sketch. Not even a piece of art; just a sketch. With 300,000 followers, she was unlikely to respond, he thought. Then, she responded. 

He got the trade; Cooper sent him a sketch of two axolotls. And she posted a picture of Thrasher’s crystallized cicada, leading to a huge amount of interest in his work. “From there I just saw the opportunity and I was like, okay, people want these; people want to buy them; I don't know when I will get this chance again; this is a once in a lifetime thing. When you wake up and a hundred people want to buy your art? That doesn’t happen.”

But it happened for Thrasher. “My [then-girlfriend] Molly looked at me and said, ‘You gotta do this.’” Within a few months, there was enough of an audience for his work that selling it became his full-time job. 

The two married in 2016 in a ceremony at Living Arts and honeymooned in Tulum. “Don't mind me, just getting crucified by the ocean,” Thrasher wrote on Instagram. But being crucified by the ocean is one thing. It’s something else to be bathed in fire. 

Part III: Fire

Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!
-The Book of James, 3:5

In Thrasher’s lab, there’s a candle. The label depicts Thrasher’s head superimposed on one of those Catholic saints, possibly Saint Francis, from the way the figure is dressed. It’s an indication of the lens through which he’s viewed in certain circles: as a sort of spiritual figure. Much of that is due to his art, his openness, his humanity that he shares with such breathless abundance. But, in some ways, I think, it’s because of the house fire.

In December of 2016, the Thrashers were recently married, and Tyler was enjoying a burgeoning career as an artist, selling a surprising amount of art online. Enough work was selling that the two could purchase a house, which they did. The future was bright. 

Then, on December 9th, the two headed out for an evening with some friends who were staying with them. Thrasher had a strange premonition, he tells me, a need to speak one of his obsessive thoughts out loud: “Wouldn’t it suck if our house, like, caught on fire?” 

When they returned from their night out, the trees in their neighborhood were blinking red and blue. Thrasher counted 12 fire trucks up and down the street, countless police cars, more than he had ever seen together at one time. And in the middle of it all, the Thrasher’s house was engulfed in bright flame, charred black, utterly destroyed. 

A firefighter approached the Thrashers and asked if they had pets. Thrasher had, indeed, had a pet hedgehog named Margo, who had been with him all through college and who had lived in the back of the house. The firefighter handed him the scorched, melted bottom of a cage. 

“I think she’s in this,” the firefighter said. 

Thrasher remembers seeing her skeleton, fused with the blue plastic of the cage. The smoke got her first, the firefighter assured him; likely she had passed out by the time the building burned. No suffering. Molly found a shovel, and they buried her. 

That was only the beginning. The bad wiring in their 1930s house had lit a spark which spread completely through it in fewer than twenty minutes. They lost everything: every book of memories, every hard drive, every work in progress, every piece of art they had collected—they were all gone. 

Except one. 

The video still exists of this. In it, Thrasher gently pulls apart a blackened art frame, the glass completely opaque from smoke. When he wrenches the glass free from the frame, there is, behind it, a perfectly-preserved pencil drawing. It's a piece by J.A.W. Cooper—the artist he had traded cicada-for-sketch with early in his career—which was his "first ever real art purchase." In it, a cicada releases from its bright green body grey smoke and orange flames, which curl upward into the somehow-intact corner of the page. A piece named “Phoenix.” 

“Life is so creepy sometimes,” Thrasher says, laughing. Before the fire, the art project he had been working on was a book titled The Wisdom of the Furnace. “It was already a badass name. The name just got twice as badass.” 

He thought hard about it. The furnace certainly didn’t seem wise at the time; it had destroyed, just as an example, his wife’s wedding dress, and most of his high school art. The hard drives containing his art projects (including The Wisdom of the Furnace) had literally exploded. They had to spend months with the insurance company, creating spreadsheets of everything they had lost. 

“Fucking sucked,” Thrasher tells me, looking me dead in the eyes. “It was scary. It was fucking scary.” But ultimately it made him, he says, a better artist. 

They made plenty of lemonade with those charred and soot-soaked lemons. Molly did a photo series inside the shell of the house. The insurance company kept to their policy, insuring the 1930s house for the value of the original building materials, allowing the Thrashers to rebuild a new house on top of the old one. A friend started a GoFundMe with the goal of raising $15,000 for the Thrashers; they raised $20,000, from over 400 donors. 

He thinks of the whole thing as a form of alchemy. How could he call himself an alchemist if he couldn’t take all of this and turn it into something else, something new, something good? 

“What’s left after the fire?” he asks, not to me, exactly, but perhaps to a version of himself staring at a pile of exploded hard drives. “It's not the fucking canvas. It's either how it made you feel or how it made the people who got to see it feel, and what you talked about, and what ideas it generated after that. That's the art. The physical stuff people want to look at and touch doesn't mean shit. So I was like, I'm still an artist. I still have the art. I don't have the pictures of it, but I still have the brain that made it and the conversations that were shared over it. So, fuck it. Let's make some more stuff and get this book done.” 

Finally, the furnace’s wisdom was evident. It’s not about the art, it seemed to say. It’s about you; it’s about your connection with other people; it’s about moving on and seeing what you find in the wreckage. 

It was finish the book or wallow, he tells me. “So I finished the book.” In fact, he finished the book by the original deadline. Then, he wallowed. 

Mental health as an aspect of Tyler Thrasher’s life will be immediately evident to anyone who follows him on social media. Last year, he says, he was diagnosed with depressive bipolar disorder, a fact he announced on Instagram. He’s not shy about his struggles; he distills them into fuel for connection. 

“It’s a bit of a struggle for me,” he says. “What I share and what I don’t.” It shows people that he’s not some superhuman, which is important to him. It also helps the people who follow him (and who, frustratingly, sometimes put him on that “superhuman” pedestal) see that their mental health struggles are far more common than they might think. “Even if it looks like I have this idyllic life, there’s a lot of struggle and pain behind that—and that is so, so normal.” He’s always walking that line, trying to present all the sides of himself, not allowing himself to fall into what he calls the “bullshit” of social media’s theater. 

Maybe it’s because of how he grew up. His family was both black and white, and in black families, he tells me, mental illness is heavily stigmatized. He knows that his black grandmother was in and out of mental institutions in the early 1900s. “I have to assume it was akin to an asylum. And no one talked about it.” 

The silence around it, the shame, the stigma: that’s where you start to get problems, he says. When everyone in your family is telling you, “nah, those things didn’t happen—things like that don’t happen,” hell, you might start to believe them. And then, when you experience it yourself, you might believe yourself to be an anomaly, which leads to isolation.

“That’s the worst thing,” he tells me. “Isolation. There are so many other fucking people dealing with this! But no one will acknowledge it. And that’s actually the thing that gets a lot of people killed.” He’s no stranger to suicide; he’s lost family members to it. Finally, he says, he had to lose his fear of topics like these. 

It took a lot of therapy: EMDR, recently. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. You sit and you talk about your traumatizing memories while following a moving light with your eyes, sometimes while tapping yourself with your fingers. The memory Thrasher talks about has to do with Carl’s Jr. 

“There was this crazy playground at a Carl’s Jr. off of Riverside. It had punching bags and little rolling pins you could squeeze through. I was totally obsessed with it when I was 7. Then, when I was 10, they said I was too big. They wouldn’t let me go through.” And this is the image he seizes upon in his sessions: that 10-year-old Tyler, trying to squeeze through into somewhere he isn’t allowed to go (like a cave, I might note). “I visit with him, check in on him. I want to let him know that there’s a lot of work being done to make sure that that little kid is okay. Like, that wasn’t provided for him then, but I’m providing it now.” 

Doing this sort of thing helps him, paradoxically, care less about keeping up appearances—particularly, the appearance of normal. There’s this sense, in nice neighborhoods like the one he grew up in, that one should have the ideal American life. The family. The white picket fence. But we all know what can happen behind closed doors. 

“Kids talk. We’d be on the playground at school and you’d hear some kid say, ‘Oh, my dad hit me last night. Anyway, let’s play catch.’ And there are lots of instances where adults don’t intervene to help kids, because to do so would be to acknowledge that things don’t look the way you want them to.” 

That’s why he’s open about his own mental health. Ignoring it didn’t work for his family, or his neighborhood, or his wider community. If he can bring it out into the light, then maybe other people can do the same. Fire doesn’t always destroy. Sometimes it fosters life. 

Part IV: Earth

No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home.
-Akira Kurosawa 

In his shop, Thrasher points to a hat hanging on a wall. It’s a felt-stitched black wizard hat, with purple and green “crystals” “growing” out of it. He breaks out into his signature wide, toothy grin when he looks at it. 

People kept calling him a wizard; he didn’t understand it. “People would say, ‘you’re so energetic,’ or, ‘you’re so lively.’” He lost count of the times that he heard someone say “you’re my favorite wizard!” So he reached out to an artist, TheFeltForge, to make … this. “I can’t think of a single object that sums up this whole adventure more than a handmade felt wizard hat with crystals growing out of it. I like to think that, at my funeral, that hat will be there.” 

Hopefully, it’s a little early to think about his death. He’s only 32 years old, with a 7-year-old and a 1-year-old. If anything, he’s just getting started. 

The store is a big part of that. So was getting a team together. At a certain point, he had to admit he needed help. That point was: Oops, I made glowing flowers and now everyone wants them. 

The story goes like this: In 2020, Thrasher was hired by Philbrook Museum of Art to create “Garden of the Ghosts” for a 2021 exhibition (“From the Limitations of Now”) examining American history and race. He made a bunch of bleached flowers and insects, and after the exhibition, they were all sitting around his lab. An interviewer on a Netflix series that he was featured in, “The Future Of,” asked Thrasher if there would ever be bioluminescent plants. 

“I was like, there are people who try,” he tells me. “A bunch of Kickstarters have failed tremendously. The whole conversation around bioluminescent plants is actually a very frustrating one, because there are a lot of startups that say they’re gonna make glowing plants, and they'll sequence stuff from bioluminescent algae or mushrooms, but they don't glow that bright.”

But the more Thrasher started to think about it, the harder he started to look at those bleached flowers. On his desk sat a jar of phosphorescent powder, the kind of powder you can use to make glow-in-the-dark and UV-reactive art. Just like with the crystals and the cicadas, his brain mashed one and two together. He dipped the flower into the powder, took it outside in the sun to charge the phosphorescent material, and walked it into a bathroom to see if it glowed. It did.

He shared it online, and, just like the cicadas, it went viral. Instead of the approximately 400 orders he thought he might get for glow-in-the-dark flowers, he got approximately 4,000.

He had a panic attack. Who the hell wouldn’t? Heart palpitations, couldn’t sleep. He figured, if he wanted to drop the ball and fuck it up (his words), he could. Or, he could figure out how to do it. The best way, he figured, was the way he had always avoided: involving other people. 

“I was scared shitless to hire other people, because I really had to start showing up,” he says. “But if you don’t have a team when there’s volume like this, you’re living life on hard mode. There’s only so much support your wife can give before she has to return to her own shit.” 

They made and fulfilled the 4,000 orders. Then they went from one color of flower to all the colors. Now, he says, the flowers are Materia’s best-selling item. 

Every step on Thrasher’s path seems to have been made out of his creative curiosity—likely the most potent force in his life. It’s led him to make his own succulent hybrid, what he calls “Crassula Thrashula”; it’s brought him features in periodicals across the academic and editorial spectrums; and most importantly, it’s brought him into contact with hundreds of thousands of people who love what he offers: openness, creativity, real humanity, when an algorithmic society threatens to flatten us into sheets of copy paper. His curiosity has led him to make even more books, like “The Universe in 100 Colors: Weird and Wondrous Colors from Science and Nature,” a study in strange and mesmerizing colors that exist across the earth and beyond; well-known YouTube educator Hank Green wrote the foreword for it. 

During the opening of Materia, when 1,000 people lined up along Admiral Boulevard to take a look, his son, Nova, 7, set up a tiny shop inside the store to sell his art. When Thrasher would get overwhelmed—with the crowd, with the noise, with the responsibility—he would walk over to Nova and wrap his arms around him, make a little bubble for the two of them.

“Are you good?” he’d ask. 

“I’m just bored,” Nova would reply. 

That might be an accomplishment in and of itself. No chaos; no fear; just a little tired while he gets to make real human money in exchange for drawings of creatures. It certainly wasn’t the place Thrasher was at as a kid, and he beams with pride when he talks about it. 

Ultimately, Thrasher’s always going back to his father’s garden, where the plants grew taller than him, where he made potions for his siblings to ward against the attacks of the world, where stories never stopped. For his own kids, he seems to be in the business of building a bigger, better, safer garden—except in this case, the garden extends to the entire world. The Tyler Thrasher project might be one of erasing fear, and there’s no room for fear of the outside world when you’ve conquered—or better, made peace with—the interior world. 

That’s why people come from all over the world to see his shop. It’s the sense of curiosity and safety that he invokes in people. You have this in you too, he seems to say, the good and the bad. The trick is to make peace with it. And if you can, make a little art with it too. 

The Pickup is an independent media company doing culture journalism for curious Oklahomans. We write stories for real people, not AI scrapers or search engines. Become a paying subscriber today to read all of our articles, get bonus newsletters and more.