FUTURA’s “Breaking Out” For First Solo Museum Show In NYC

_{FUTURA “Uncle” sculpture, Bronx Museum of Arts. Photo: Bucky Turco}

Five decades after Leonard Hilton McGurr took the name FUTURA 2000, his visionary approach to art, graffiti, fashion, and design has elevated the native New Yorker to a global icon. But McGurr, who turns 69 on November 17, takes it all in stride, forging a path that is a testament to the power of playing the long game. Half a century in the making, the artist comes full circle with FUTURA 2000: Breaking Out now on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The exhibition traces his journey from the street to the studio, working across painting, drawing, sculpture, and brand collaborations, as well as site-specific installations.

For all of McGurr’s commercial and critical success, he is refreshingly self-aware and down to earth. “To be in the show in the Bronx, it’s not even a dream come true, because quite frankly that wasn’t really my aspiration,” he says. “And I also thought, maybe I wouldn’t live to see it.” But live, he did. Hailing from 103rd Street and Broadway, McGurr came of age in the late 1960s during the height of the Space Age. But back down on earth, the city was beginning to crumble under the weight of “benign neglect,” the promise of postwar America little more than a Ponzi scheme, leaving disaffected youth seeking their own destinies.

Inspired by the first flush of graffiti hitting the streets and the trains, McGurr started writing “FUTURA 2000” in 1970 at the age of 15. But one night in 1973, when his partner ALI (Marc André Edmonds, 1956–1994) was badly burned in a fire while they were bombing the 1 Tunnel in Harlem. Seeing no way forward, McGurr changed course, enlisting in the U.S. Navy and spending four years abroad. He returned to New York in 1978, just as the golden age of subway art had taken hold, reunited with ALI and reformed the Soul Artists graffiti crew. But four years traveling the world had changed McGurr, and his imagination took flight.

In 1980, he returned to his old stomping grounds with BREAK, a top to bottom whole car envisioned as a fantastical work of abstract art. Like hip hop DJs who sampled breaks from classic funk songs to craft a kaleidoscopic drum patterns, McGurr distilled the elements of graffiti, the clouds of aerosolized paint in vivid colors that blend and melt, punctuated by yawning break in the “canvas” where the artist signed his name. As the train sped through the South Bronx, photographer Martha Cooper lay in wait, capturing it the very day it was painted and later immortalizing it in the 1984 classic, Subway Art.

For a brief, shining moment, graffiti upended the art world. With Patti Astor’s FUN Gallery setting the East Village ablaze, writers like McGurr, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee, John CRASH Matos, and Chris DAZE Ellis drew the attention of the downtown elite, sparking a radical chapter of art history. In a New York minute, Tony Shafrazi brought the scene to Soho, showing McGurr, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf. “I was hanging out with [Fab 5] Freddy, Keith, ZEPHYR, DONDI, REVOLT, Lee, Jane Dickson; it was this whole moment,” McGurr says. “Everyone was doing characters, pieces, and lettering but I was off on my own island doing abstraction, forms, and color fields. I think that gave me confidence to keep exploring that individuality amongst my contemporaries.”

With the critical success of graffiti came political backlash, with the MTA hell bent for leather of destroying the greatest public art project the city had ever known. Art critics tried to buff out McGurr’s cultural ties and rewrite his vision to fit their narrow frame of expertise, comparing his work to Wassily Kandinsky and Antoine Watteau despite the fact these dead white men were of no influence whatsoever. McGurr, who had just come off tour with the Clash, was less than impressed with shoddy scholarship and refused to play the fool. By the time Subway Art arrived in 1984, the art world went cold, casting graffiti writers to the wayside in search of new blood.

That same year, McGurr had his first child and started working as a bike messenger at Elite Couriers just as fixed bikes hit the streets, cultivating a glorious subculture of speed demons with undisputed sartorial flair. As the millennium came to a close it became clear, the world was not about to forget FUTURA. French fashion designer Agnès B became one of his early patrons in the ‘90s, helping him get his first studio. Realizing his teen vision of the future was shortsighted, McGurr dropped the date from his name and opened his design studio, Futura Laboratories, in 1997. He instinctively picked up where Keith Haring and the Pop Shop left off, blurring the boundaries between fine and commercial art through collaborations with visionaries like Rei Kawakubo, Virgil Abloh, and Marc Jacobs. “Ive been so lucky, meeting the right people who are there in support at long last, whether it’s my management, the creative team, my partner — people really behind me,” he says.

Although McGurr has reached the height of his career, his priorities have not changed. “My kids are 40 and 34, and what’s remarkable is I’ve done all this stuff to arrive at this moment because it was secondary to me in terms of how I live my life. I’m grateful that I created this identity in which I have made a living off being myself, but I don’t live there,” he says. “My life isn’t calculated like a chess game. I’m not selling myself in any way. I try to just treat people kindly. I try to adapt and get things done, whatever the mission.”

FUTURA 2000: Breaking Out is on view through March 30, 2025, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

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