![]() ![]() Graffiti advocate and sociologist, Gregory J. II. Out of the Barrioįrom the Bronx to Brooklyn to the East Side of LA and back again, complex calligraphic and pictorial languages emerged that identified neighborhoods and, in turn, those graffiti artists who, anonymously through their tags or style, received the fame they craved and deserved. The graffiti and hip hop artists and advocates featured in the two films – Fab 5 Freddy, LEE, Lady Pink, Dondi, Futura, Crash, Grandmaster Flash, Debbie Harry, Patti Astor, among others, were the celebrated creators and heroes of these two identifiably American art and music movements. Shortly after, Fab 5 Freddy and Lee Quiñones were featured spray-painting in the video of Debbie Harry’s 1981 song, “Rapture.” The 1983 films Wild Style and Style Wars reconfirmed the explosive and highly contagious nature of graffiti and hip hop in New York and throughout the country. It was Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring’s first public exhibition together. The famous Times Square Show in 1980, in a vacated former massage parlor, brought over a hundred New York graffiti artists together and gave me my first full exposure to the movement. “What a quintessential marriage of cool and style to write your name in giant separate living letters, large as animals, lithe as snakes, mysterious as Arabic and Chinese curls of alphabet." No less than Norman Mailer blessed graffiti in his 1974 essay The Faith of Graffiti. This notoriety encouraged graffiti writers throughout the city. “His TAKI 183 appears in subway stations and inside subway cars all over the city, on walls along Broadway, at Kennedy International Airport…” Two years later, a New York Magazine article, “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand,” praised the innovation and potential of the graffiti movement. In July 1971, under the headline “’Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” the New York Times highlighted the work of a 17-year-old from 183rd Street. ![]() Lee Quiñones, Whole Car Cluster 2, 1980-1983. In 1977, LEE (Lee Quiñones) and his FABULOUS FIVE crew painted a whole train, ten cars, over two nights! As singular works of graffiti penetrated another subculture, the art world, the accompanying sounds have been of bank wires and auction gavels.įor me, having grown up in New York, the words of Jeffrey Deitch, in the catalogue for his iconic 2011 LA MOCA exhibition Art in the Streets, were on point: “A subway trip could be an immersion into utter urban anarchy or a shot of explosive artistic energy – it was probably both.” From the 1970s, new tags and styles of graffiti writers from every neighborhood were spread by the subway system, which carried not only the artists themselves, but itself became the underground (in some neighborhoods rising into open view) cinemascopic link to the boroughs. It was, in part, its own subculture loudly accompanied by punk rock, rap, and hip hop, often coming out of the writers’ own boomboxes. Graffiti writing, the very making of this visual language, often became synonymous with a discontented youth culture producing (often at night) anti-authoritarian gestures small and large – from tagging to pieces (short for masterpieces) on walls and subway cars. Beginning on neighborhood walls and under overpasses, sometimes marking gang territories then on subway cars (outside and in), oil tanks, telephone booths, mailboxes, and makeshift exhibition spaces and then into galleries, museums, and private collections, the diversely styled evolution of graffiti has been pervasive, global, and significant in the development of contemporary art. Often illegal and decried, graffiti is a highly innovative urban art form. ![]() ![]() 1970s / GRAFFITI / TODAY, while vividly representative of the graffiti movement in New York and Los Angeles over the past half century, is by no means exhaustive. ![]()
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