Subway Art on Steroids: Spray Nation Sorts Through Mountains of Kodachromes

Page after page of golden NYC hits from the Martha Cooper archive; this new hardcover tome expands the galaxy for fans and academics of that amber-soaked period when it seemed like New York was leading a Spray Nation of graffiti for cities across the country. Known for her ability to capture graffiti writers’ work in its original urban context, Ms. Cooper once again proves that her reputation as the documentarian of an underground/overground aesthetics scene is no joke.
With an academics’ respect for the work, the practice, and the practitioners, Cooper recorded volumes of images methodically for history – and your appreciation. With the vibrant and sometimes vicious city framing their pieces, an uncounted legion of aerosol-wielding street players raced city-wide at top speed, ducking cops and cavorting with a confident abandon in the rusted and screeching steel cityscape. By capturing these scenes without unnecessary editorializing, Cooper gives you access to the organically chaotic graffiti subculture on the move at that moment – directly through her unflinching eyes.

Culled from thousands of her Kodachrome slides from the early 1980s, the celebrated photographer and ethnologist worked with American graffiti historian Roger Gastman over many months during the initial Covid period to select this rich collection of images of tags, walls, and pieces. Each turn of the page more profoundly deepens your understanding of the graffiti-writing culture Cooper captured with Henry Chalfant in their book Subway Art nearly forty years ago. That clarion call to a worldwide audience took years to reverberate and shake culture everywhere. With time that book became the standard root documentation for what many see as the largest global democratic people’s art movement in history.
A smartly laid-out and thick volume (as well as its “Outtakes” collection), the high-quality printing and spare design hew to the photographer’s reliably straightforward approach, preferring to let the photos tell the story. From this perspective, Spray Nation is likewise a sleeper; We’ll probably only wholly appreciate its pivotal value and cultural importance with time.














Martha Cooper: Spray Nation. Signed Limited Edtion Box Set is published by Beyond The Streets. With a foreword by Roger Gastman and essays by Steven P. Harrington, Miss Rosen, Jayson Edlin, and Brian Wallis. Click HERE to purchase the book.
Other Articles You May Like from BSA:
Poesia and EKG Talk to BSA about an Audacious Survey A new show organized by Poesia, a San Francisco based graffiti artist and founder of the site Graffuturism, pulls together one hundred or so art...
“Gouzou” are on the loose in Grigny, thanks to their creator, French graffiti writer and muralist JACE. JACE. Wall Street Art Festival 2019. Grigny, France. (photo © Galerie MathGoth) A childr...
New York is one of the few pedestrian cities that has an active street culture almost everywhere you walk and the tradition of the revered holiday window display is one that endures even though many p...
Virtually every human culture has an allegorical image that illustrates the Tree of Life. Street Artist Gola Hundun is growing his own in Denmark on the Jutland peninsula - one that he has nam...
Cigarettes for all! That includes you kids! Come on, smoking is cool! You can just imagine a critique by helicopter moms of this new work for Judith Supine's "Golden Child" show somehow morphing into...