Jim Riswold, the adman-turned-artist who was Wieden+Kennedy’s first—and perhaps greatest—copywriter, died Friday after a long battle with cancer. He passed away with his children by his side at his home in Portland, Oregon, according to W+K. He was 66.

Riswold was central to a number of iconic W+K campaigns for Nike in the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s, from Michael Jordan’s “Mars Blackmon” and “Hare Jordan” to Bo Jackson’s “Bo Knows,” Charles Barkley’s “I Am Not a Role Model” and Tiger Woods’ “Hello World.” Riswold also ran W+K’s experimental ad school, W+K12, for several years.

Dan Wieden may have written Nike’s legendary tagline “Just do it,” but it was Riswold who Wieden said “wrote like a god” on Nike for two decades.

“Aside from Dan Wieden himself, it can be said that Jim Riswold is objectively the single largest creative influence on the way Wieden+Kennedy has done what it does over the course of its 42+ years in existence,” Karl Lieberman, the agency’s global chief creative officer, wrote in an email to staff this weekend. “If it weren’t for Jim, W+K wouldn’t be W+K.”

Also read: Jeff Goodby pays tribute to Jim Riswold

A walk on the wild side

James Paul Riswold was born in Seattle on Dec. 7, 1957, to Paul and Paularose Riswold, later to be joined by sisters Sheila and Marilee.

After earning degrees in philosophy, history and communications from the University of Washington in 1983, he joined small Seattle agency Sharp Hartwig as a copywriter. In 1984, he moved to Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, which had been founded two years earlier, as its first official copywriter hire—partnering with then-junior art director Susan Hoffman.

Riswold quickly made his name at W+K with work for Honda scooters starring Lou Reed, Grace Jones, Devo and Miles Davis. The unexpected use of celebrity musicians—Reed licensed “Walk on the Wild Side” for a spot (see below) at a time when “selling out” was sacrilege—earned Honda a huge amount of press and helped put W+K on the map.

But it was Nike’s Mars Blackmon campaign, called “Spike & Mike,” that would raise the agency into the cultural zeitgeist. Riswold had seen Spike Lee’s movie “She’s Gotta Have It” and figured Lee’s fast-taking Mars character—who was obsessed with his Air Jordans—could be a great foil for Jordan in commercials.

Riswold wrote some scripts, and on Dec. 7, 1987—Riswold’s 30th birthday—they shot the first two spots, with Lee directing.

The campaign was hugely popular and helped propel Nike into the juggernaut it became—instilling a culture of creative excellence at the sneaker giant and driving staggering sales growth as well.

Nike brought Mars back repeatedly over the years, including for its 50th anniversary campaign in 2022. “I think the most important thing, if you look at those [first] spots, you could tell a bunch of people were having a bunch of fun making them,” Riswold said in 2020.

A legacy of culture-busting Nike work

Riswold would be central to practically every major Nike campaign from W+K throughout the 1990s. “This brand was his true calling, his passion, his ticket to the show,” Wieden would say later.

From “Hare Jordan” to “Bo Knows,” from “I Am Not a Role Model” to “Hello World,” Riswold created one cultural hit after another. Believing the athletes were as interesting as people as they were as performers, Riswold would dig into their personalities—making work that was joyful, provocative, culturally meaningful and just plain fun.

“No matter the client, Riswold was always creating work that had a real shot at getting into culture and being famous,” Lieberman wrote in his email to staff.

Riswold himself was especially happy with the “Bo Knows” campaign, particularly the Bo Diddley partnership. It defied traditional thinking to use Diddley, who was not well-known to young people in 1989. But to Riswold, that’s what made him cool. Rather than reflect the target market back to itself, Riswold was always offering something fresh and unexpected, creating trends rather than following them.

“It was wrong to pair Bo Jackson with Bo Diddley,” Riswold wrote in a 2006 essay for Ad Age. “It was wrong to pair an odd duck of a fan named Mars Blackmon with Michael Jordan. It was wrong to have Charles Barkley declare that he was not a role model. It was wrong to cast David Robinson as Mr. Rogers. ... Wrong, wrong, wrong. No amount of research would have told you that any of these ads would have been successful.

“I worship wrong,” he added, encouraging the industry to create “advertising that dares to be more than not wrong.”

Illness and art

Riswold was diagnosed with leukemia in 2000 and would battle several forms of cancer for the rest of his life. In 2005, he retired from W+K—though he would return several times to help on different projects—to work as an artist. He would later quip that he went from “selling things people don’t need to making things people don’t want.”

For his first show, he exhibited photographs portraying history’s most hated leaders—Hitler, Mussolini, Hermann Göring—as toy figurines in absurd settings. A prolific artist, Riswold referred to his work as “absurd realism,” and he brought the same provocative irreverence to art as he did advertising.

Riswold returned part-time to W+K in 2009 to direct the W+K12 school. By this point, he was a legend in the agency’s halls—and across the industry. Acerbic, self-deprecating and hilarious in equal measure, Riswold was a mentor to hundreds, always willing to give advice to young advertising talent as well as artists.

In his final years, Riswold consulted with W+K creative teams regularly, even working on campaigns for Major League Baseball and Nike. When Nike and Tiger Woods parted ways earlier this year, after a 27-year partnership, it was Riswold who penned the farewell line: “It was a hell of a round, Tiger.” 

In 2013, Riswold was inducted into The One Club’s Creative Hall of Fame. Newsweek once named him one of the 100 most influential people in American culture. But he was always more interested in experiments than accolades—in pushing the boundaries of whatever art form he was immersed in.

“I don’t think I did this to pursue my big ego, but just to see what might work and what might not,” Riswold said in a 2006 Ad Age interview. “I’ve always said that when I go, I want ‘Oops’ on my tombstone.”

Riswold continued to create art in his final months. “I wake up every day with new ideas for new shows,” he told colleagues in late 2023, as he prepared his latest one, at Augen Gallery. (When the show opened, a sign posted outside—written in classic Riswold style—read: “Putin says wear a mask or Riswold dies!”) 

As his health failed in recent months, Riswold even turned his own impending death into a kind of art project, working with his daughter Hallie on an Instagram series themed “Not Dead Yet.” Hallie and her brother Jake posted the final images in the series on Sunday.

Riswold is survived by Hallie and Jake, his sisters Sheila and Marilee, their children, his first cousin and best friend Derek Ruddy, and his many friends and colleagues. The family has asked that any gifts be made to the Knight Cancer Institute and the Interstitial Lung Disease Program at Oregon Health & Science University.