Street edge
Classic graffiti art highlighted in nyC exhibition.
Spray-painted at night on a handball court, the mural showed a comic book character peeking from behind a trash can with the words: “Graffiti is a art, and if art is a crime, Let God forgive all.”
that 1978 work helped propel the illicit graffiti art movement out of the subway and into the mainstream. So, it’s only fitting that a canvas recreation of that mural (the original was painted over around 1988) is a part of a major exhibition on graffiti art (now open) at the Museum of the City of new york.
“it was the shot heard around the world,” said its creator Lee Quinones, also known by his tag Lee. “this was a movement that needed a visual manifesto. i wanted to bring that conversation that was so elusive in the subways above ground, to a context almost similar to a museum.”
Only 18 at the time, Quinones became known among his generation for covering a 10-car subway train. He and an artist named Fab 5 Freddy were among the first to earn gallery recognition with a 1979 exhibition in rome.
What makes the new york City As Canvas exhibition unique is that it focuses only on works from the city that were collected over the years by east Village artist Martin Wong, who befriended and mentored many of the graffiti artists and promoted their once-renegade art form. Wong’s collection of more than 300 such works was donated to the Museum of the City of new york before his death in 1999.
about 150 are in the exhibition, which runs through aug 24.
Graffiti exploded in new york in the 1970s because of the subway – an expansive canvas for the young renegade artists. the seminal 1983 documentary Style Wars and other media attention contributed to its spread beyond new york.
But only a handful of the largely teenage graffiti artists were “doing what we would call masterpieces, blanketing whole sides of trains,” said the exhibit’s curator, Sean Corcoran.
Wong “had the foresight to scoop all this stuff up when no one else in new york was thinking about it seriously,” said Sacha Jenkins, a writer and filmmaker who has written extensively on the graffiti movement.
as evidence of graffiti’s growing credibility as an art form, Corcoran pointed to the public interest in the elusive British street artist Banksy and the outcry over the recent whitewash of a new york City hub of aerosol art known as 5pointz.
“Graffiti-influenced art is on the verge of a new breakthrough,” said Quinones. – ap