Museum of the City of New York Presents Above Ground:Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection
In the heart of the Museum of the City of New York, Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection unveils a vivid and largely underexplored chapter of the city’s cultural history. This exhibition pays tribute to Martin Wong—an artist, visionary collector, and tireless advocate for graffiti art and artists—whose life and work embody a deep commitment to the creativity and resilience of urban communities. Featuring previously unseen pieces donated to the museum 30 years ago, Wong’s collection captures the explosive energy of the graffiti movement, charting its transformation from wild and gritty expressions on subway cars to celebrated works in museum galleries.
Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Wong moved to New York City in 1978 and immersed himself in the electric art scene of the Lower East Side. Known for his richly detailed paintings and layered storytelling chronicling urban metaphors, brick walls, and themes of longing, Wong infused his work with themes of decay, identity, and queerness. His art also mirrored his fascination with the overlooked and undervalued, fueling his passion for graffiti as a powerful cultural movement and moment.
Arriving in New York at a pivotal moment for graffiti, Wong formed close relationships with trailblazing artists like Rammellzee, Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, and Fab 5 Freddy. For Wong, graffiti wasn’t just an art form—it was a cultural force capable of redefining how we view public space and artistic expression. While mainstream critics at the time dismissed graffiti as no more than vandalism, Wong saw its significance and heard its voice, steadily collecting sketches, canvases, and photographs to preserve the movement’s energy and innovative inclinations. His welcoming approach provided a bridge for graffiti artists transitioning from the streets to galleries and created a time capsule of a fleeting yet transformative period in New York City’s cultural history.
Above Ground offers visitors a chance to experience Wong’s vision firsthand, featuring iconic works by artists like Keith Haring, Futura 2000, and Tracy 168, alongside rare photographs by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant. The exhibition traces graffiti’s journey, from earliest subway tags to the East Village’s groundbreaking galleries, such as Fun Gallery and Fashion Moda, which first showcased, danced with, legitimized graffiti within a portion of the art world. It also explores how Wong’s foresight in preserving these works cemented graffiti’s role as a vital cultural and artistic movement.
“Above Ground celebrates the 30th anniversary of Martin Wong’s donation to the museum and the 10th anniversary of MCNY’s initial City as Canvas exhibition,” says Sean Corcoran, Senior Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York. “This show offers a renewed and expanded look at graffiti’s journey from NYC streets to the most prestigious galleries around the world.”
The exhibition’s relevance extends beyond nostalgia. At a time when art on the street is increasingly commercialized and public spaces are sanitized, Above Ground underscores the cultural importance of preserving graffiti’s original raw, unfiltered approach. The show invites a broader conversation about the movement of street art into institutional spaces—and questions if these transitions honor the art’s rebellious spirit while making it accessible to new audiences. Wong’s eye for collecting ensures these early talents remain vivid and vital, ready to inspire a new generation of creators navigating the evolving relationship between public art, the negotiation of public space, and the transition to gallery and museum walls.
By celebrating Martin Wong’s legacy and his eye, Above Ground preserves a crucial part of New York’s history, and thanks to the museum, it is open to viewers through Summer 2025.
Urban Revolution. On view from July 21 / December 03. Lisbon, Portugal.
“Urban[R]Evolution: A Journey from Graffiti to Contemporary Art” is a large exhibition that marks the rise and popularity of urban art and features original installations by 18 renowned Portuguese and international artists. Curated by Pauline Foessel and Pedro Alonzo, this showcase takes place at Cordoaria Nacional in Lisbon, running from June 21st to December 3rd.
The historic and iconic building that once served as the National Rope Factory during the late 18th century, catering to the needs of the Portuguese Navy by producing ropes for naval purposes, is situated near the scenic Tagus River. With its imposing neoclassical and industrial design, the building stands as a testament to the city’s cultural heritage and is now a versatile venue for hosting events after its meticulous restoration. With free-standing booths carefully built not to endanger the historic structure, the flow of the exhibition offers a pod-like adventure to visitors to experience individual artists’ work and visions. Some utilize the spaces fully with installations, while others choose the homey quality of an artist’s studio with work in progress.
The exhibition brings together a lineup of artists whose work was featured in early graffiti images by photographer Martha Cooper, second-wave western street artists who have burnished their names in the commercial urban contemporary art milieu, and a collection of names more locally known – each with profound ties to the graffiti and street art scene. Among them are esteemed names such as Barry McGee, Futura, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Vhils, and Obey SKTR, to name a few. The curators thoughtfully selected these artists to narrate the fascinating development of urban art, tracing its origins from early tags, graffiti, and subway pieces to its current expression as street art and mural art.
Many of the artists are associated with previous projects of the curators and with one of Lisbon’s anchors of the street art scene, the artist and businessman Vhils. Aside from these connections and the common roots of early graffiti culture, it may be difficult for ticketed visitors to the show to discern the commonalities of the works on display. The connective tissue between the booths will be the many iconic photographs of North American photographer Martha Cooper, whose lens has captured the human experience in urban areas for about 50 years, immortalizing the origins and evolution of graffiti, street art, and urban art – when the scene was viewable directly on the train cars and streets of major cities like New York.
Another nerve center for the show is the installation by conceptual street artist ±MaisMenos± , known for his thought-provoking art pieces and street activations that sublimely challenge social norms and provoke critical thinking. Within this kinetic electronic display, a phalanx of screens emulates a bustling stock trading floor, listing street artists and graffiti artists and their market line charts bumping up and down alongside various commercial, academic, institutional, and cultural influencers and influences that have coalesced to foster their success.
In this exhibition’s composition of artistic expressions, each artist has the opportunity to tell their unique story through their installations and accompanying texts, reflecting on their journey from the streets to the contemporary art world. “Urban[R]Evolution” is a testament to the significance of Lisbon as a vital city for urban art, with the show embracing a dynamic mix of international pioneers and established/emerging talents from Portugal.
This major exhibition, presented by Everything is New and Underdogs Gallery, invites visitors on a dreamlike, poetic, and moving journey, oscillating between light and shadow, the humor and rancor of the street, expressing the heart of urban art’s evolution. It is an immersive experience into urban art’s origins and possible future, exemplifying a sample of the boundless creativity and diverse voices that have emerged from the graffiti and street art scene.
Our sincere thanks to exhibition participant and famed photographer Martha Cooper for sharing here her photos exclusively with Brooklyn Street Art, and to Vasco Vilhena, one of the exhibition’s official photographers.
The artist presented a video installation addressing the “market” for graffiti and street art, the intersection with art and commerce in a brilliant display.
“This took me to what is my thesis subject, where my work is the centerpiece of an eventual (or questionable) dichotomy between street art and the art market, the evolution from illegal, interventive and subversive work into a continuous institutionalization, mercantilization and commoditization, normalized with the (before pursued) but now consecrated and valuated (street) artists.
All of this materialized in an art industry (or market) of artist-companies, studios, galleries, festivals, fairs, museums, curators, collectors, political and media attention, touristic tours, financialization, etc, as so it is with the art world as a whole. Being this specific show, for its size, importance, where it is, its public, a realization of this “evolution”, or this stage of the urban arts. So I thought of an installation as a self-critique and self-awareness of this stage and present context of urban art (one of which myself and my work makes part), how capitalism kidnaps, agglutinates and transforms its (possible) critique and counter-culture, commodifying, massifying and selling it.”
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening: 1. Da Corte looks at Everyday Icons
2. Vhils – Jose Saramago
3. FUTURA on How To Think About Identity + Brand, and The Power of Collaboration. Via Idea Generation
BSA Special Feature: Alex Da Corte looks at Everyday Icons
“In a darkened gallery, artist Alex Da Corte appears projected on the wall in Slow Graffiti (2017) as Boris Karloff, performing as both the actor himself and his 1931 role as Frankenstein’s monster, blurring the lines between actor and character. In his work, the artist never appears as himself, but rather, embodies the larger-than-life characters who influence or intrigue him: Mr. Rogers, the Wicked Witch of the West, Marcel Duchamp, and the Pink Panther are but a handful. Studying these characters who exist in worlds of fantasy and cartoon and integrating them into his own expansive artistic vision, Da Corte hopes to gain a deeper understanding of them and learn new ways of thinking. Alex Da Corte was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1980 and lives and works in Philadelphia.
Da Corte creates vibrant and immersive large-scale installations, including wall-based works, sculptures, and videos. Colorful and surreal, his work combines personal narrative, art-historical references, pop-culture characters, and the glossy aesthetics of commercial advertising to reveal the humor, absurdity, and psychological complexity of the images and stories that permeate our culture.”
Alex Da Corte / “Everyday Icons” – Season 11 – “Art in the Twenty-First Century”. Via Art21
Vhils – Jose Saramago
“That is the virtue of maps, they show what can be done with limited space, they foresee that everything can happen therein.” José Saramago, The Stone Raft
FUTURA on How To Think About Identity + Brand, and The Power of Collaboration. Via Idea Generation
“What’s a good idea, what’s a bad idea…you gotta give both a shot”
“Street Art pioneer FUTURA started painting his name on walls as a coping mechanism to deal with his struggle with identity. But as he turned a signature into a brand, he quickly realized that it could also be a business. And that’s where things got interesting. From Lower East Side galleries to t-shirts and toys to collaborations with nearly every blue chip brand you can name, over the last 40 years, FUTURA has redefined what it means to be a pop artist.”
Behind the scenes at “Beyond the Streets London” is a hive of activity, with artists deeply focused on installing their work and seeking assistance with tools and equipment. Curators, organizers, and lighting professionals are bustling up and down the stairs, carrying props, or ladders, and communicating with vendors and artists via text message. Salespeople are diligently crafting wall texts to accompany the art pieces. It’s a few hours before showtime, yet everything is somehow accomplished just as the first guests arrive for the preview.
Photographer Martha Cooper is electrified by the activity at Saatchi Gallery. The event preserves the rich history of graffiti, street art, and commerce while pushing forward with new trends and directions. Cooper, who has documented this scene since the 1970s, has attended and exhibited in “Beyond the Streets” exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles – and we anticipate the next stop could be Shanghai. This particular iteration showcases an evolving mix of archetypes and invention, drawing on diverse influences from the US, UK, and EU.
Cooper observed many surprising music references at the show. Rock icon Eric Clapton was at the opening admiring a photograph of text declaring him to be God while filmmaker, musician, and BBC radio host Don Letts had a personal collection of his memorabilia/ephemera on display. Ron West, designer of the “Duck Rock” boombox, also made a sudden appearance at the opening, allowing guests to pose with his creation. Among the standout pieces was a Bob Gruen photo of Malcolm McLaren holding that boombox in front of Keith Haring’s Houston Street wall, a masterpiece of intersectionality, if you will.
Overall, “Beyond the Streets London” offers a smorgasbord of colors, flavors, and influences that are difficult to encapsulate in one show. However, Gastman, the visionary, gives it a good try, with a respectful nod to the many artists who have shaped this worldwide people’s art movement. Enjoy these behind-the-scenes shots from Ms. Cooper.
It may be a challenge to identify the through-line when it comes to curation of artworks at an auction house exhibition. Selections are predicated on the availability of artworks at the moment and the exigencies of the market. And 30 additional variables.
You will however see a warm confirmation of greater themes in the new exhibition at Phillips auction house that opened last week entitled 1970s / Graffiti / Today, and you’ll leave enriched by the experience. With the works of 30 or so artists on display for approximately a month, it is not intended to be a comprehensive survey, yet it manages to spread a wide net over a number of scenes, practices, and personalities working on US streets during the previous five decades.
There is a vastness to this scene, its people, its practices, its histories, its quality variations. As evidenced by a show like this, there is now a general acceptance of the street-born form of visual expression called graffiti, its various hybrids expressed broadly as street art, and the onward march of certain forms of both toward acceptance as contemporary art. As suggested by the title, you’ll probably see a good representation of each here, and one or two will strike you as quite impressive.
Curator Arnold Lehman is a recognized champion of that march forward, most notably for when he shepherded the “Graffiti” exhibition as Director of the Brooklyn Museum in 2006. That show, one of the first museum shows dedicated to the movement, featured 20 large-scale canvasses by graffiti artists that were donated by the estate of famous mid-century New York gallerist Sidney Janis, who had shown a number of them in the early 1980s.
A native New Yorker, Lehman grew up with graffiti on the trains and easily recognized the contributions it was making to his city and the culture. When he had an opportunity to introduce the works as an exhibition, he says he faced much opposition, despite the fact that it came from the collection of a gallery owner who was celebrated for introducing most of the emerging leaders of abstract expressionism, the Fauves, the Futurists – and later the proponents of Pop.
“He began showing graffiti in his gallery in 1981 or 1982,” Lehman says of Janis when speaking of the canvasses he organized in the Graffiti show at the Brooklyn Museum. “A number of my colleagues were quick to write and say, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ “
Five of those same canvasses provide an anchor in the timeline here, supported with early photos and light ephemeral documentation of the burgeoning graffiti scene on subway trains and elsewhere in New York. This city and its streets and culture figure prominently into this collection of about 150 pieces, with Mr. Lehman estimating for us during a recent tour that the mostly US-focused show is divided into two-thirds New York and one-third Los Angeles.
“The artists we are showing really deserve a presentation like this,” he says as we walk through an exhibition of individual expressions that are as varied as the kind of people who’ll typically ride a subway car; drawings from sketchbooks (Al Diaz), stenciled canvas (Chaz Bjorquez), photographs (Martha Cooper, Gusmano Cesariti, Steve Grody, Cheryl Dunn), elaborate “wood paintings” on welded steel sculpture (Faile), canvasses by early generation graffiti pioneers (Fab 5 Freddy, NOC, Daze, Lady Pink, Toxic, Haze), repurposed metal subway signs (Julius “T. Kid” Cavero), a slickly painted motorcycle (Crash), mixed media collage (Augustine Kofie) a refurbished ice cream truck (Mr. Cartoon), a repurposed bus stop poster (KAWS), an acrylic painting on scrap metal (Margaret Kilgallen), a mounted neon sculpture (Risk), paper cutouts pasted on found wooden doors (Swoon) and a heavily tagged Fun Gallery refrigerator hit up in the early 1980s by people like Basquiat, Haring, and Futura.
The newly completed Phillips gallery is ironically and literally underground. Its thousands of square feet lie just below the Park Avenue street level, lending a hidden secretive quality to it. Nevertheless, the massive venue sports triple-height ceilings and a vast marble spaciousness that allows for mounting and lighting a variety of gallery sizes, shapes, and volumes. It’s also free.
One piece caught our eye and the eye of our companion, the photographer Martha Cooper, whose photos of 1970s-80s graffiti on subway trains places her squarely at the center of the scene. It’s the large fabric canvas/backdrop that commands one of the walls in the gallery – not only for its dynamism of placed elements and handstyle-vibrance but because of the history of the piece and the cross-section of writers and performers who intersect on it. Attributed to Futura 2000, it also contains work by Dondi and a tag by Phase2, at least. It also pays tribute to the musician and performer Afrika Bambaataa, the Rock Steady Crew, a number of possibly British graffiti writers and crews.
When posted on social media by people like Futura and Ms. Cooper this week, discussion of this piece lit up like a fire – with people surmising different venues where it may have been displayed, arguing about the propriety of selling such an item, conjecturing about who owns it, and spotting it in the background of photographs by Janette Beckman and David Corio.
Mr. Corio allows us to show his images here of that event, which he identified as being part of the London stop of the NY City Rap tour, November 23rd, 1982. Assessing photos and the relic itself, one surmises that it was not signed by all the persons named necessarily since its function was a marquee naming of participants of the tour as well as a vehicle of visuals.
Corio later posted images from the event on his Instagram with his current recounting, but we like this older one from his website, as it is lyrical.
“Welcome to the future. This was one of the first hip-hop shows in London and it was at my favourite place to shoot gigs. Bam had brought with him vibrant visions of the New York street in the form of graffiti legends Fab Five Freddy and Futura 2000. While he played, they spray-painted the backdrop. Londoners had never experienced any gig like this before – with break-dancers from Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation and a team of skippers doing the double-dutch. ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Looking For The Perfect Beat’, two singles of 1982, along with Grandmaster Flash’s ‘The Message’, gave notice of a new musical force breaking out of New York – hip-hop and electro – and it was all rising straight off the record decks. It was amazing to witness this revolution in person.”
As you stand before the piece, you may better appreciate the human scale of some events that have stepped into a golden storied past. Without these antecedents, many would not have known the art, music, and dance world as it evolved – nor appreciate the components that Hip Hop grew and evolved from. Looking at this unnamed banner, you remember again that once in a while a piece of art transcends itself, and becomes a historical document.
1970s / Graffiti / Today is an opportunity for fans and historians to see some of these works before they disappear into private collections. That alone is worth the trip.
1970s / Graffiti / Today at Phillips Auction House in Manhattan, NY is open to the public until February 20, 2022.
Our sincere thanks to photographer Martha Cooper for contributing her photos to this article. Her Instagram is @marthacoopergram
Thank you as well to the photographer David Corio for allowing us to use his historical photos here. To learn more about him and his work please go to www.davidcorio.com and his Instagram is @david.corio
Miami awakens from a Covid-19 stupor this year with a bonified Art Week, featuring associated fairs and events like Wynwood Walls that are activated by the Art Basel behemoth. Some of the high-profile organizers of yesteryear may be on the ropes this time but you are sure to see many of your favorite and familiar art dealers, drug dealers, street artists, graffiti writers, djs, taco sellers, and lucite stiletto slide-ons. Cold weather birds love to fly here for the art fairs and a quick suntan and a Pina Colada just after Thanksgiving every year – it’s equal parts breezily laid back and sketchy and only slightly hedonistic, the gritty-glam blocks of Wynwood know how to keep it real, unless it was silicone to start with.
We’ve heard some solid talents are going to be in the neighborhood, of their own volition or by invitation, as is usually the case. Wynwood Walls is offering 11 artists painting the outdoor space and the Brooklyn art duo Faile mounting a large indoor exhibition of new works that are sure to shock and thrill new fans and those who have watched them from street to museum in and elsewhere in between in their 22 years as visual alchemists. We’re also interviewing them live onstage at Wynwood Walls Wednesday December 1st at 7 pm. We’d love to see you there and talk with you so please stop by and say hello!
With a theme of “Agents of Change” Wynwood Walls is bringing AIKO (Japan), Diogo “Addfuel” Machado (Portugal), Bordalo ii (Portugal), David Flores (United States), Scott Froschauer (United States), Joe Iurato (United States), KAI (United States), Kayla Mahaffey (United States), Mantra (France), Ernesto Maranje (Cuba), Greg Mike (United States), Farid Rueda (Mexico), and for the first time, Wynwood Walls will open one wall to a local artist in an “Open Call” competition.
After Covid kept us all away from this exhibition, BSA and Martha finally got a chance to see her retrospective in person, rather than through virtual 3-D tours or videos and photos. Here she is at a vitrine this morning for our first official tour together in person.
Welcome to BSA Images of the Week. Our hearts and minds are heavy and quiet this weekend as we contemplate the two decades and lost lives and liberties since September 11, 2001.
It’s impossible to know what the world would have looked like had those fateful events not taken place twenty years ago, and only a handful would have predicted that it would have been used as a springboard for more wars that cost more lives. As the country pulls out of Afghanistan so badly and obviously, a real examination of the soul is taking place. There is no real purpose served by trying to extricate the pain of loss locally from those sufferred globally as a result of the events of September 11th, except for us New Yorkers to reflect on how our city is forever changed. Thankfully, New Yorkers prove time and again that we are also forever determined to overcome and to come together.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week featuring BAT, Below Key, BK Foxx, Chris RWK, Chupa, De Grupo, Early Riser NYC, Fumero, Futura, Hand Up, Manik, Modomatic, Naito Oru, Pope, Rezo, and Toofly.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “Dinner For Few.” A short film by Nassos Vakalis. 2. NYCHOS. Five Weeks Of Rabbit Eye Movement 3. Futura X Wynwood Walls. Chop ’em Down Films 4. Shok1 in St. Petersburg, Florida
BSA Special Feature: “Dinner For Few.” A short film by Nassos Vakalis.
“Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry of wonderful times to come,” an applicable bromide for all those folk who got the big Trump tax cut last year. Meanwhile, you are rationing your insulin.
“(The capitalist machine” solely feeds the select few who eventually, foolishly consume all the resources while the rest survive on scraps from the table. Inevitably, when the supply is depleted, the struggle for what remains leads to catastrophic change.”
NYCHOS. Five Weeks Of Rabbit Eye Movement
A road-trip film is an ideal vehicle for mythmaking and definition of persona, especially when accompanied by timely music choices and distracted stares into the burned horizon. This amber-tinged panoply of rockstar travel shots, nomadic spraycation side trips, behind-the-scenes production, off-the-grid hippy encampments, rusted detritus sculpture, post-apocalypse signposts, and the energized, intensely industrious, exquisite dissection of Nychos that puts his oeuvre under the microscope and behind the looking glass. Alternately elegant and violent, this is a laboratory sweep of imagined scenarios that can make the mind cavort with fear and lust, toil and soil, pensive thought and power chords, ready to be sliced and peered into.
Futura X Wynwood Walls. Chop ’em Down Films
A
brief look at Futura as he recounts his revisiting of a mural he made in Miami.
Calling to the fore his inspired abstractions that first set him apart from the
pack in the late 70s/early 80s, it’s a treasure to see engaged with his past,
his process, his futura.
Shok1 in St. Petersburg, Florida for Shine Mural Festival.
2nd in a row from Chop ‘Em Down Films, this look at the technique of Shok1, who reveals the world through his brilliant mastery of x-ray and fantasy, is a rare treat and a great way to close this week’s survey.
Welcome to Wynwood! – A little piece of chaotic urban paradise and real estate development that has blossomed into a mini-holy city for fans of murals.
The convergence of three events during the 2010’s – cheap digital camera phones, social media, and mural festivals – have created this intense and colorful tourist neighborhood in Miami during the same time. The sheer number of happy extended families, groups of friends, and couples in love all were converging on the evolving neighborhood to see art in the streets. They also take pictures with it, pose in front of it, buy refrigerator magnets of it, and listen to tour guides speak about it.
During a recent day in the Wynwood Walls compound, which is surrounded on neighboring streets with a plethora of other murals, unsanctioned Street Art, and graffiti, we saw a number of newly painted murals that have replaced others there. We also saw that a few of the old favorites have been reinvigorated. Here is just a handful of images of the action.
Here’s our weekly interview with the street, this week from Miami, and this time featuring Dasic Fernandez, Ernesto Maranje, Faile, Michael Vasquez, Buff Monster, Futura, Dan Kitchener, and Tats Cru.
They used to run from the Vandal Squad in this
neighborhood. Now people pay to see their art here.
Through the expansive glass wall on the 6th floor you can look down Kent Avenue to see the spot where a monster pickup truck with a heavy chain tied around a FAILE prayer wheel almost jackknifed on the sidewalk, gave up and sped away. Not that many Brooklynites saw that event in the 2000s – nobody walked here and few people drove through Williamsburg then except truckers looking for street walking ladies wearing high heels and spandex. Oh, and a serial killer.
Now visitors buy tickets to see a circular colonnade of FAILE prayer wheels here at 25 Kent – including the real estate developers and Wall Street professionals who displaced the community of artists whose work made the neighborhood attractive and “edgy”.
Along with Street Artists in this exhibition like Shepard Fairey, Bast, Swoon, Invader, Aiko, Dan Witz, Katsu, 1UP, and Lister, the FAILE duo put completely illegal artworks on walls under cover of night and threat of arrest in this same neighborhood then – transforming it with many others who are not in this show into an open gallery of the streets, placing Williamsburg on the map as New Yorks’ epicenter of the newly emerging Street Art scene.
As graffiti and Street Art are migratory and necessarily elusive by nature, this story is only one chapter in a volume of history that serious academics are now reconstructing and analyzing. With each passing year and published white paper, the practices of 20th century public mark-making are being examined in greater detail for archiving and for posterity. Not surprisingly, institutions, patrons, collectors, and brands are increasingly interested in this story as well.
When it comes to the anarchic subculture of illegal
street art practice and its influence on society, there are non-stop ironies
sprayed en route from verboten to Vuitton, and street culture has supercharged
the imagination of the mainstream and high culture throughout history – that’s
where the best ideas come from sometimes. Many seminal artworks from “the
scene”, as it were, represent much more than what you are seeing at first
glance. As art and cultural critic Carlo McCormick has described the iconic
Shepard Fairey ‘Hope’ image in Art in
America, many graffiti and Street Art works saved are “not a
fleeting pop-culture sensation but simply the latest crossover hit in a long
line of underground classics.”
The wide-ranging survey that is Beyond the Streets makes sure that you know where the roots are, and who many of the pioneers were. It is impossible to tell a complete story that includes scenes as diverse as west coast Chicano muralism, hobo graffiti, hip-hop commercial design, NY downtown artivism, Japanese low/hi contemporary, skateboard, tattoo, early train writing and a current romance with muralism, but BTS at least gives a serious consideration to each and offers you the opportunity to look further into them.
With the help of photography documentation from people like Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, Jim Prigoff, Lisa Kahane, Joe Conzo, John Fekner, Bill Daniel, Maripol, and Dash Snow, the crucial importance of this work provides needed interstitial and contextual information that enables myriad stories to be elucidated.
Exhaustive, no. Exhausting, possibly. Pace yourself.
“I
spent my life surrounded by graffiti and Street Art,” says the shows’ director
Roger Gastman “and you could say that I have been obsessed with understanding
the culture, its origins, and its evolution. It’s incredible to me how far it
has come.”
With 150 artists whose practices span five decades
and various (mainly) American subcultures displayed in a maze of new walls in
this 100,000 sf, two-floor exhibition, the Beyond the Streets senior curatorial
team includes Gastman, filmmaker/ graffiti historian Sacha Jenkins SHR, Juxtapoz
Editor in Chief Evan Pricco, and author/ graffiti historian / graffiti writer David
CHINO Villorente. Each curator brings core competencies and knowledge of the
graffiti scene (Gastman, Jenkins, Villorente) as it has evolved to include the
Street Art practice and an eventual move toward contemporary art (Pricco).
“It’s absolutely phenomenal,” says Villorente, who says his history as
a graffiti writer compounds the impact for him. “I was glad that the show was
coming to New York because I was born and raised in Brooklyn. I couldn’t have
imagined it – especially when I think back on when I was writing on the trains
and doing illegal graffiti. To have of show of this magnitude is really
special.”
“We started writing in ’68 and here we are, fifty-one years later,” says Mike 171 as he gestures toward himself and crew writer SJK 171 when talking about how they began and continued writing their tags on the street in New York City. “This is the history right here,” he says, and you know you are about to be schooled about the plain realities of early graffiti writing. At the opening, you witness each guy tagging in a large dusty window here and realize the love for writing never actually stops.
“We were expressing something that was inside of us,” says SJK 171. “The streets were like ours,” he tells you against a backdrop of their work, Cornbread’s work, and of images full of one color, single line monikers that set the stage for the more colorful, character-driven pieces and burners a decade later, transforming trains into a rolling aesthetic symphony by the mid 1970s.
One of the actual “whole car” writers of that period, Lee “LEE” Quinones, here recreates a “Soul Train” car side on a canvas that looks like it could easily wrap an actual MTA #2-line car that he used to slaughter with cans in the middle of the night at the train yard. When describing the new work he said he was intentionally keeping it simple – perhaps owing the style to his earlier practice.
“I think this is one of Lee’s most amazing pieces,” says Charlie Ahearn, the director of the seminal 1982 “Wild Style” film that Quinones stars in. Ahearn self-produced that film which became an important distillation of the merging of graffiti with hip-hop culture during a pivotal moment in the history of both. Now also a professor of Hip-Hop, art, design, and documentary film making at Pace University, Ahearn is familiar with many of the artists work here, many relationships reaching back decades. “I told Lee that I liked that it was a one-off, that he painted all the color straight off without the embellishment, texturing, and all that stuff.”
Charlie’s twin brother John Ahearn is represented here popping out from walls as well, his sculptures serving as authentic portraits of people you may easily have seen on New York streets over the last four decades. Casted directly on top of the people themselves in a technique he has perfected, the placement of the sculptures gives life to the space.
The individual clusters of work and canvasses by 1970s-80s train painters like Futura, Crash, Lady Pink, Freedom, Carlos Mare, Blade, Haze, and Daze and next gen graphic painters like Doze Green and Rime are complemented by a number of so-called “immersive” spaces here like the Mission Schools’ Barry McGee storefront with smashed window, and the Australian Pop duo Dabs & Myla’s eye candy floral walls with thousands of artificial fauna created in collaboration with Amelia Posada.
The high-profile graphic activist Shepard Fairey’s 30 year career overview takes a large area and encompasses all elements of his street and studio practice, and Bill Barminski’s cardboard home is open for you to explore with a wry smile, remembering the security room installation he did at Banksy’s Dismaland a couple years earlier.
You’re
also treated to a full rolling wall of Craig Stecyk posters that brings you the
sun and surf of California skate culture, sculptures by Mr. Cartoon and Risk, a
kid-friendly illustrated room with crafting supplies for young fans on tables
from HuskMitNavn, and an astute freight train culture educational display by
writer/painter/sculptor Tim Conlon (complete with a mid-sized Southern Pacific freight
on train tracks he and friends built), prints/photos by historian Bill Daniel, and
original drawings by the man some call the King of Hobo Art, buZ blurr.
“These
are a self portrait as predicated on a first Bozo Texino person and I kind of
changed the image around,” says Mr. blurr, a legendary figure in denim
overalls, as he patiently describes his classic tag image of a railway cowboy.
“It
is a writer motif – the pipe smoke is going up and then it is trailing back to
signify movement as the train goes down the track,” he says. “I worked in the
train yards and my job was as a brakeman. I had a little free time so I started
making drawings. I made my first one on November 11, 1971,” he says as he
recalls the state of mind that he was in at the time as he began to tag
freights with the image and text that came to him clearly – and may have
perplexed other travellers.
“They
came from a confused state. I was questioning everything. I was putting kind of
cryptic messages under my drawings. It was anybody’s guess as to its literal
interpretation. I addressed some of them up to specific people but whether they
saw them or responded to them, I wouldn’t have any idea.”
“When
it’s shipped in the crate its 550 pounds,” says Conlon as he stands by the 3-foot
high freight car re-creation on tracks and ties that is
hit with a couple of wild and colorful graffiti burners. “Here I’m going to
show you something,” he says as he pulls back the roof to reveal the narrow
coffin interior in rusted red. “So I’m going to hide some beer in here during
the opening party. This is like the fifth one of these I’ve made,” and he proudly
confides that one lives in the house of Robert Downey Jr.
Digging Deep to Take Risks
Not content
to rest on laurels and previous formulas of success, the show keeps a freshness
by presenting known entities pushing themselves further and taking creative risks;
a reflection of that spirit of experimentation we have always prized on the
street.
Graffiti
writer Earsnot from Irak crew, now known professionally as Kunle Martin, said
he had been making work for the gallery containing elements of graffiti, but
felt they were too “safe”.
“Then my friend Dan said ‘you should go back to doing drawings,’” he says as he stands before figurative canvasses in black and white on cardboard. “I said ‘I can’t! It’s too hard! But eventually I began working in my studio five days a week, and I made enough for a show.”
Reflective of the attitude of Gastman toward artists in the community, he told Martin that if he made enough of them, he could place them in this show. “I think he was happy to hear that I was in my studio working. He’s been very supportive of it.”
A fluorescent
color-drenched graphic/photographic collage style is featured with plenty of
space in large frames from Chicago’s Pose, who says he is letting photography
and geometry lead him away from his previous pop collage style that may have reminded
many of Lichtenstein. His inspiration here comes from his research into early
photos of graffiti writers running from police “I was
obsessed with John Naars photos and I have usually Norman Mailer as in
inspiration. Some of these photo references are from the Philadelphia Inquirer,” he says.
New York’s Eric Haze also dares himself to take a new direction with three canvasses featuring a refracted piecing-together of imagery and memories of this city in monochrome. Based on black and white scenes of the city by photographer and NYC taxi driver Matt Weber, the scenes capture aspects that are culled from imagination and impression. The centerpiece canvas captures an iconic piece of the Williamsburg waterfront that has been removed in the last few years by developers; the signage of the old Domino Sugar factory by the Williamsburg Bridge.
Mr. Haze said he meant it as a gift and tribute to
his wife, actress and longtime resident of the neighborhood, Rosie Perez who
used to see it along Kent Avenue as a kid. “He’s not afraid to take risks. He’s not afraid to go in the
studio and express what’s inside of him. When he brought me to the studio, he
says, ‘I have a surprise for you’,” she remembers. “I saw the beginnings of the
Domino painting and I was stunned into silence and I got teary-eyed.”
An expanded version of the show that first mounted
in Los Angeles last year, the collection is focused a great deal on the
American history of graffiti with a balance of East/West coast graffiti history
– in a way that may remind you of 2011’s “Art in the Streets” at LA MoCA. That
makes sense, considering Gastman co-curated that show as well.
“It’s both a historical and current look at where
the culture went and where it started and how widespread it is,” says
co-curator Evan Pricco, who perhaps provides a lynchpin view toward the big
name Street Artists who continued to push expectations in the 2000’s on streets
and in commercial galleries around the world. “With the space spread over two
floors it has a way better curatorial sense. I also think it does compete with
museums because it shows that this kind of work is on the same level. You kind
of have to present it in a way that feels very institutional and archival.”
So is Beyond the Streets
a graffiti show or a Street Art show or a contemporary art show? For artist
Kenny Scharf, who first gained attention during the heyday of Downtown
Manhattan’s art scene that benefitted from an interlude where rents were dirt
cheap and Wall Street was on a cocaine high, there is no need to categorize
what kind of art this is.
“You know I never liked labels or titles anyway so
even back in the early 80s I was pegged like ‘oh you’re a graffiti artist,’” he
says. “People feel the need to title and label so I’ll
let them to continue to do that but I don’t fit into any of them and I don’t
want to. I want to fit into all of them and none of them.”
Beyond the
Streets opened June 21 and continues through the summer.
Martha Cooper’s work as exhibited at Beyond The Streets New York
Beyond The Streets NYC is now open in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to the general public and will run until August 2019. Click HERE for schedules, tickets and details.
One benefit of being ahead of your time is that you can paint your own rules, discover your own voice, set a standard. A drawback is that you may have to push forward on your own before you gain support for what you are pursuing. The key is to keep moving.
Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.
As Futura pulls fully into the frame of contemporary artist, its important for upcoming artists to remember that he had a long route – including being a bike messenger on Manhattan’s untamed streets to provide for his family – while he was waiting until the rest of the street and art world caught up with him. Now that Street Art has confirmed that his abstract explorations on subway trains were an early sign of what was coming, brands and gallerists and collectors often call. “Full Frame” helps appreciate the body of work he developed during that time.
Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.
Self named Futura 2000 when that sounded futuristic, Lenny Gurr
has done more painting on canvas than he realized since the early 80s and his
style has continued to evolve and clarify.
“Just for people to finally get a look at my work – I feel like a lot of what is being revealed hasn’t really been seen,” he tells us as he describes the nearly 300 page yellow tome “Full Frame,” published by Drago and organized by Magda Danysz. Among the richly illustrated pages, Danysz presents important benchmarks in Futura’s steadily growing career and personal life that bring the evolution closer to the reader.
In terms of the visual language in these sketches, diagrams and canvasses, there are a wealth of orbs and symbols and sprays and washes and stellar interstellar journeys that you have never seen before. Evolution appears to be natural for Futura, his pores and nerve endings collecting signals, firing synapses, pushing deep into imaginary worlds.
Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.
Influences run from expressionists, abstractionists, modernists, punks, the race to the moon and the moonage daydreams of city hippies everywhere. His recurring circle motifs are as much about his internal mind and world as they are about the cosmos.
A sense of balance in the chaos is always present, the palette choices impeccably on point, sharply sweet and frequently daring. Is this fantasy or diary? If Futura hasn’t flown to most of these places, it’s not because he hasn’t tried. But we’re treating these pages and frames of eye-popping other-worlds as evidence that he has.
Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.
“I think for the most part people appreciate survivors,” he is quoted in the book. Few survivors could be so freely percolating with ideas and graceful in their delivery.
Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.Futura 2000 FULL FRAME By Magda Danysz. Drago Publisher. Rome, Italy. 2018.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
