Category: Features
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 […]
Every four years, the airwaves are saturated with pundits, pollsters, and political scientists trying to predict who will be America’s next president. Most of them fail as often as they succeed, lost in the endless swings of campaign drama, poll fluctuations, and media noise. And then there’s Allan Lichtman, a distinguished political scientist at American […]
Front cover of Louis Carlos Bernal: Monografía (Aperture, 2024); cover image: Louis Carlos Bernal, Dos Mujeres, Douglas, Arizona,1978. © Lisa Bernal Brethour and Katrina Bernal. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Gift of Helen Unruh. In 1836, just one year before Mexico outlawed slavery, a province in the north went rogue and declared […]
IZ Aqueduct (1983), Photo by Tod Lange Pound for pound, Michael “IZ THE WIZ” Martin is the undisputed all-time, all-city king that made all the writers from Queens be extremely proud to come from this glorious borough. IZ’s shadow looms large in the annals of Graffiti in NYC and whatever far corners of the world […]
CBGB’s, Blondie, Flyer, 1976. Courtesy online Gallery 98. As the 1960s gave way to the ‘70s, a new generation of New York upstarts transformed the downtown nightlife scene forevermore with an inimitable blend of glamour, grit and DIY mythos. The arrival of Max’s Kansas City in Union Square signaled a change of guard; with Andy […]
Graffiti writers equipped with mountain climbing gear and spray paint, rappelled down the iconic Hell Gate Bridge like a well-trained SWAT team, and unleashed a torrent of public art on the span’s massive stone towers. Under the cover of darkness, the daredevil-artists risked it all, as they dangled about eight stories above the ground—at the […]
In a city of radicals, innovators, and originals, there is only one Rammellzee: a visionary among men who left this earth in 2010 at the age of 50. Hailing from the trenches of Far Rockaway, Queens, Ramm came up as a writer just as graffiti meemerged as the voice of New York. Between 1974 and […]
Justin’s big fro (September 11, 2013) During the Korean War, photographer Hatnim Lee’s father left his home in the North for Busan, the second largest city in South Korea. There he met Lee’s mother, whose older sister had fallen in love with an American GI, married, and moved to Northern Virginia. “We got there in […]
Closing party of South Bronx Hall of Fame exhibition [Ahearn, bottom, second from right], Fashion Moda, October (1979) | Photo by Lisa Kahane Against the backdrop of landlord-sponsored arson that buildings to rubble and ash, South Bronx emerged at the vanguard of music, art, and culture during the 1970s. Graffiti writers bombed the trains inside […]
Whitney Houston Wembley Arena, London | 1988 “I first heard African drum rhythms and chants at the movies, and they weren’t too different from the old Negro spirituals I grew up with in the South. There was a relationship. Though I didn’t know anything much about Africa, it felt familiar,” Isaac Hayes writes in the […]
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(Protest with @citizenactio
