The Bushwick Collective’s Block Party 12th edition ended with a bang and big crowds. This year Joe Ficalora, the founder, organizer, and curator, threw a warehouse party as part of the festivities and included a full-size replica of a New York Subway train designed by Danny Cortes and tagged by dozens of graffiti writers from the Metropolitan Area. We gave you a sneak peek of the train last week HERE. Today we bring you complete documentation with details shots of the train. BSA spoke about the project with Mr. Cortes, Edward Rivera, Mike See, and Joe Ficalora.

“So it’s amazing to me that you have taken something massive like a 1980s subway car, shrunk it down at one point to a highly detailed miniature…. and now you’re blowing it back up again!” says a BSA interviewer.

“It feels amazing, to tell the truth,” says artist Danny Cortes while a small team of fabricators and painters working feverishly on the full-scale car for an installation at the Bushwick Collective Block Party.

“Which one’s harder to do? The full-sized version or the smaller one?”

“The miniature,” Danny says with no hesitation. “Because the intricate details are so tiny and difficult to mimic something, you know? But it’s all; it’s so much fun. It’s so much fun.”

Cortes has been having a lot of big success in recent years making his painstaking replicas of New York scenes that make you feel warm and nostalgic for the streets; bodega storefronts, ice storage machines slaughtered with tags, box trucks, blue US mailboxes covered with stickers, the front of CBGB’s club, ice cream trucks, even tiny video VHS tapes of classics like “Wild Style.” And like the best writers in the day, he has been blowing up – scoring exhibitions and sometimes a celebrity client.

“I can show you what I’m working on,” he says, “I can show you, uh, one that I got for Drake for July” he reaches in his pocket to pull out his phone to show you his replica of a subway train pulling in under the tiled sign that says “Atlantic Avenue”. “So Barclays Center commissioned me to make this for Drake for his tour that’s coming in July. I’ll show you on Instagram. So it has almost the same concept.”

Mike See, who has been working long hours for days with Edward Rivera (aka Shutter Ed) and a team of people to fabricate this train, doesn’t even seem fatigued. When he talks about the sophisticated techniques of creating the lights, the windows, the seats, the finishes, and even the strap hangers – you can tell he’s excited to be a part of a crew. He may be more excited to have seen some graff heads who stopped by to tag the train in progress.

“A bunch of legendary graffiti artists came through – they cleared the warehouse for certain people to come in and be secretive. They did what they do, and there are layers of graffiti history from New York City graffiti right here. Is amazing. Outsides, insides, .. it makes you imagine the movie ‘The Warriors.’”  

“Legends in the game,” says Cortes of some of the tags they have collected on this tribute train. “These are names that have been doing it for years and used to hit this same style of train for years. So this makes it more authentic. Not only is it like a stamp for me, but it’s also, it’s important to bring realism,” he says as he describes the process of layering, distressing, and applying finishes to the original pieces and tags to make them appear as authentic as possible.  

“That’s why I faded out sometimes, right? You know, just to give it that overlay look and the fade distress, the stress look. That’s my style. The gritty, dirty, rusty. Yeah. What’s an eyesore to somebody else’s eye? It’s beauty to me, okay. So I accomplished that on this piece right here with my team.”

This replica of a subway car has been tagged for this special project by GIZ, SAINT, GHOST, THEAM, IR, CES, SPOT, JAKEE, KED, PGISM, ACNE, BERT, AND LANDO, DANNY CORTES, NEP, NOE, CHEO MSG, AND MIKE SEE among other graffiti writers.

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