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 […]
Cover of Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond (Damiani Books, 2024). Photo by Chris Stein. It’s been said that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, which may be true among those who trade only in words but, for an artist the cover is paramount. It is the single […]
By the 1970’s, Times Square had become a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah. As the red light capital of the eastern seaboard, the Great White Way offered a new kind of Broadway show any time of night or day, peddling pleasures of the flesh on the streets, XXX movie theaters, strip clubs, brothels, and sex shops […]
CAINE ONE tribute by LADY PINK The life and death of Woodside writer Edward Growalski, more famously known as CAINE ONE, has captured the imagination of several generations of graffiti writers, be it from Queens or parts afar. His untimely passing in 1982, right at the cusp of mainstream acclaim and entry into the legitimate […]
Growing up in Yorkville during the early aughts, photographer Wes Knoll was crushingly bored by the homogenous scene on midtown Manhattan’s eastern shore. But once in high school, the world finally began to crack open. “I could have never imagined whether it just be like being able to hop on a train and be what […]
Charlotte St., The Bronx. Rubble in a vacant lot with four apartment buildings in the background. A large Puerto Rican flag hangs from the rightmost building. 1980 © Joe Conzo Jr. Set against the backdrop of landlord-sponsored arson and “benign neglect,” over 97% of seven census tracts in the South Bronx were left vacant or […]
