About Our Owner

Artist, printmaker, curator, gallerist, impresario, and owner of All Star Press, Zissou Tasseff-Elenkoff was born in San Francisco and raised internationally in Paris and London. The son of artists, his mother's deep curiosity and love of painting, cinema, conceptual art, collecting zines and underground comic books primarily shaped his childhood visual landscape; and his father, an entrepreneur and independent jewelry designer, who created bespoke pieces for clients such as Louis Vuitton, Sonic Youth, and Madonna, piqued his enterprising spirit.

Zissou grew up in a cultural milieu of punk rock, pop art, video games, New Wave French cinema, and cosmopolitan aesthetics. At sixteen years old, he sold his first painting to a woman on The Tube and gained confidence in his nascent art making practice and began selling work to his dad's friends and clients.

 In 2002, at twenty years old, he returned to the states to visit colleges and while taking the Blue line, saw the city's skyline and fell in love with the vast possibility of Chicago's crooked smile.  He went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and explored a myriad of new ways to create, utilizing resources afforded to Art Institute students. He studied screen printing, photography and film and began forging connections with other students in an emerging DIY community of makers, outside of the university system.

He opened Fugscreens Studios in 2007 (FUG, a Ramon's reference, a 70s psychedelic band, and the initials his stepdad Rob would enter into video game high scores), a print making shop in a still bohemian section of a changing Wicker Park. Out of Fugscreens Studios, Zissou continued to explore and experiment with his craft and began designing event posters for The Mud Queens, Chicago's only all-female mud wrestling troupe. This led to opportunities to create handbills, flyers, banners, and more for the city's growing and vibrant Indie music scene. For over a decade he created visuals for Iggy Pop, Elton John, Chance the Rapper, Phish, Patti Smith and dozens of other acts. To help build and foster a community, he began offering print making classes out of the studio via word of mouth and eventually landed listings of the burgeoning Chicago-based company Groupon.

A natural connector and relationship builder, Zissou became a colleague and organizer of a growing community of graphic designers and print makers who also had a desire show their fine art and studio work. Out of Fugscreens Studios, Zissou began curating his first gallery shows and soon realized the gig poster scene was global. He traveled around the world meeting artists at SXSW, Pitchfork, Primavera Sound in Barcelona, The Reeperbahn in Hamburg, and other music industry festivals.

The creative community he was meeting and building with, inspired him, along with a former student, to open Galerie F in Logan Square in 2009, a groundbreaking gallery that served as a meeting space for artists, collectors, neighborhood folks and knuckleheads, a counter to the more traditional and elitist fine art galleries that were price prohibitive and aesthetically inaccessible. Galerie F aimed to be democratic, in terms of who was on the walls, and who was welcome in the space. A tribute to his anti-authoritarian British punk roots, Galerie F was demographically and stylistically diverse and helped to transform the visual landscape of Logan Square and usher in a street art frenzy in the city of Chicago.

After five successful and exhausting years, Zissou left in 2016 to begin his latest incarnation, All Star Press. All Star Press, which opened in Logan Square in 2017, went viral for a series of Chicago-centric jerseys Zissou created as prints, merging, at the time, the disparate genres of fine art, music, and athletics in a way the city had not yet witnessed. All Star Press continued the egalitarian and equitable spirit of the spaces he created before, but now introduced studio, public art and art collecting practices to an even boarder audience, the Chicago sports fan, continuing to erode boundaries that keep a city separate.

All Star Press, now going on eight years strong, is now a world-renowned home for highly accessible fine art and art prints, and gathering and making space where artists, collectors and casual fans meet, have beer, see a show, an artist talk, and leave with affordable art and a meaningful, unforgettable, one-of-one experience.
Zissou works with hundreds of artists and clients, continuing to create impactful, accessible art interventions in the public and corporate space. His clients now include The Chicago Bulls, Chicago White Sox, Museum of Contemporary Art as well as artists like Revok and Bev Fishman. By bringing together his skill set as a creator, curator, bridge builder, printer maker, and consultant, Zissou is the CEO of All Star Press, an ad-hoc creative agency.

He is a proud and committed father who is forever grateful for his family and the endless support and genius of his partner Susie and her constant ability to check and check in with him about how to live a full, balanced, and uncompromising life.