Photographer, artist, and unofficial LES mayor, Clayton Patterson, recalls the time he illegally painted the wall on Houston Street and the Bowery in 1990. He tells The VIllager that “it had been empty for quite a long time,” and then one day, he “just decided to take it over.” Read more »
RCN cable in the East Village doesn’t care about your public art nostalgia, it’s their building and if they want to paint over a mural of President Obama by Chico they can. And so they did. Although, their spokesman characterized the art a little bit differently, telling DNAinfo: “The bottom line is the building had illegal graffiti on it and we cleaned it up — period.” Read more »
While many real graffiti writers were in the train yards painting whole cars and later moving to the streets to bomb, there was at least one guy traversing the East Village with spraypaint doing things legally: Antonio “Chico” Garcia. For the past 30 years his soft style of aerosol artwork adorned countless permission walls for various businesses, memorials, and pop cultural moments. But no more! Chico left town for Tampa, Florida which basically means open season on all his spots—although even while he was in town it didn’t really stop anyone from ragging his stuff. In related news, if this is the kind of stuff that Martha Cooper is gonna be blogging about, she might want to considering sticking to her specialty: taking photos.
|Photo: Wallyg|
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