It’s difficult to pinpoint when t-shirts became a platform for art. But nowadays, a shirt can convey an artist’s statement, a political message, or an ironic image that takes the time a painting does to create. So who are these textile artists, and how are they getting their shirts on the public’s back?

One of them, Craig Hunter, sells his wares on the DIY marketplace Etsy, under the name CubistLiterature. His shirts range from silk-screened tees with French or German quotes to reconstructed thrift store finds with hand-sewn felt appliqués (he’s sporting one here). The 24-year-old artist left school and home in Texas this past February to work and live in Red Hook, making a go of selling on Etsy and doing pretty well at it — he supports himself entirely on his 4-8 shirt sales a day.

As easy as it is to start a t-shirt business on Etsy, though, standing out amidst the hundreds of thousands of sellers can be a seriously daunting task.

Enter Rumplo, a t-shirt-aggregating site that launched earlier this year and was just nominated for BusinessWeek’s Best of the Web awards (against stiff competition like Google). No t-shirts are actually for sale on the site, but rather are linked back to their online shops. Rumplo also sends a weekly “10 Amazing Tees for Tuesday” email, occasionally paired with a t-shirt designer interview.

Its twentysomething founders, designer Sahadeva Hammari and developer Ian Van Ness (pictured), both live in Brooklyn. Sahadeva describes the Rumplo mission as this: “To make it easy to find and buy the most amazing shirts from around the world and support the artists that make them.” It differs from other big shirt sites like Threadless — “a t-shirt manufacturer…and an amazing operation,” according to Sahadeva — which has a few dozen designs up for sale at any given time.

What’s next for Rumplo? New ways to browse tees and social features are in the works, and the two founders are always on the lookout for new designs and designers, like Brooklyn-based The Shirt Project as well as the very new Two Blue Cars at the Brooklyn Flea.

Sent by Alicia.