Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

The phenomenon of graffiti, surfacing in the early 1970s on the walls of subway trains, playgrounds, and underpasses, spread quickly to other publicly accessible urban targets in New York's five boroughs. Rejecting the pejorative associations frequently attached to the word graffiti, its teenaged practitioners adopted the identification "writers" to emphasize their formal interest in letter shapes and interactions (personalized as "tags"). The term writers also reflected their belief in "getting up" (street argot for the skill of placing tags, or "hits") as a potent mode of inner-city communication unintelligible to mainstream observers. In the process of making its mark on the cityscape, the burgeoning subculture acquired codes of conduct, regional variations in style, and identifiable masters. It simultaneously earned the enmity of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and of taxpayers unnerved by the mercurial appearance of graffiti on private and civic property.¹

By the mid-1970s the controversies unleashed by graffiti's renegade tactics, and debates over whether graffiti should be considered decoration or defacement, stimulated art-world interest in the creators of these underground graphics. Some of the more adept and enterprising of these young writers were persuaded to transfer their energies from illegal to "legitimate" surfaces -in other words, to apply spray paint to canvas.² A select group, which included Lee Quiñones, soared into short-lived fame as inventors of the hybrid genre called aerosol art. Between 1978 and 1984 their work traveled internationally in a range of exhibitions, films, and alternative art showcases. Once stripped of the audacious circumstances of its street, or outlawed, production, however, graffiti's word-as-image aesthetic failed to sustain commercial momentum. To stay viable under these competitive circumstances, writers like LEE began to expand their repertoire pictorially, integrating cartoon, advertising, and other mass-media iconography into their compositions, along with occasional political commentary.

Born in Puerto Rico, LEE came to prominence as a graffiti writer in 1976 with a daring, decorative piece called Doomsday that covered two full cars parked in the Lexington Avenue Local train yards. Moving far beyond tag embroidery, this touchstone work incorporated images of tenements, flames, and a horned monster, establishing the maker's powerful intuitive design abilities. Two years later Howard the Duck appeared on the handball-court wall of Corlears Junior High School 56 on Henry Street on the Lower East Side. Proclaiming "Graffiti is a art [sic]," the duck figure, shown balanced on a trash can with lid held as a shield against a spray paint assault, was a mischievous character from D.C. Comics with whom LEE identified. Like a number of other site-specific murals he produced in the period, this was an invited commission arranged by the principal of the school.³ The mural's impact was strong enough to earn him commissions from several nearby schools. A few years later an order followed for a smaller-scale partial replica of Howard the Duck on canvas, which revealed the influence of commercial art's illusionistic techniques.

Notes:

1 The literature on the history of New York City's graffiti movement in the 1970s is vast and often contradictory. A balanced overview is offered by Jack Stewart in his doctoral dissertation "M.T.A. -Mass Transit Art," New York University, 1989; excerpts were published as an article accompanying the 1997 Groniger Museum exhibition catalogue Graffiti: Coming from the Subway.

2 Many of the dealers and art-world figures involved in courting these young graffiti artists, who came predominantly from New York's poorer ethnic neighborhoods, faced accusations of having exploited them for gain and then withdrawing support when the art market for aerosol paintings grew cold in the 1980s. A few other notable efforts to rechannel "writing" off the tracks and into studios had preceded this period, however. For example, the 1972 organization of United Graffiti Artists (UGA) at City College, spearheaded by a streetwise sociology major named Hugo Martinez, gave graffiti writers an early forum for discussing craft aesthetics and for exhibiting their spray work on "legitimate" surfaces like background paper. By 1973 paintings by UGA members had broken into the Soho art world with a show at the Razor Gallery, which also toured elsewhere. The initial group disbanded in 1974, although Martinez remained active in promoting the movement's legitimizing ambitions.

3 In a telephone interview on October 14, 1998, LEE recalled that Corlears' art teachers were "upset" when he did the handball-court mural because "all the kids wanted to do was watch me paint, rather than pay attention to their school work." In 1979 he produced murals for other school playgrounds in the vicinity, the piece for P.S. 137 being titled Hell Never Dies.


Howard the Duck 1989 LEE [Lee George Quiñones] (b. 1960) Acrylic on canvas, 57 X 90 Gift of Martin Wong, 94.114.1
The phenomenon of graffiti, surfacing in the early 1970s on the walls of subway trains, playgrounds, and underpasses, spread quickly to other publicly accessible urban targets in New York's five boroughs. Rejecting the pejorative associations frequently attached to the word graffiti, its teenaged practitioners adopted the identification "writers" to emphasize their formal interest in letter shapes and interactions (personalized as "tags"). The term writers also reflected their belief in "getting up" (street argot for the skill of placing tags, or "hits") as a potent mode of inner-city communication unintelligible to mainstream observers. In the process of making its mark on the cityscape, the burgeoning subculture acquired codes of conduct, regional variations in style, and identifiable masters. It simultaneously earned the enmity of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and of taxpayers unnerved by the mercurial appearance of graffiti on private and civic property.¹ By the mid-1970s the controversies unleashed by graffiti's renegade tactics, and debates over whether graffiti should be considered decoration or defacement, stimulated art-world interest in the creators of these underground graphics. Some of the more adept and enterprising of these young writers were persuaded to transfer their energies from illegal to "legitimate" surfaces -in other words, to apply spray paint to canvas.² A select group, which included Lee Quiñones, soared into short-lived fame as inventors of the hybrid genre called aerosol art. Between 1978 and 1984 their work traveled internationally in a range of exhibitions, films, and alternative art showcases. Once stripped of the audacious circumstances of its street, or outlawed, production, however, graffiti's word-as-image aesthetic failed to sustain commercial momentum. To stay viable under these competitive circumstances, writers like LEE began to expand their repertoire pictorially, integrating cartoon, advertising, and other mass-media iconography into their compositions, along with occasional political commentary. Born in Puerto Rico, LEE came to prominence as a graffiti writer in 1976 with a daring, decorative piece called Doomsday that covered two full cars parked in the Lexington Avenue Local train yards. Moving far beyond tag embroidery, this touchstone work incorporated images of tenements, flames, and a horned monster, establishing the maker's powerful intuitive design abilities. Two years later Howard the Duck appeared on the handball-court wall of Corlears Junior High School 56 on Henry Street on the Lower East Side. Proclaiming "Graffiti is a art [sic]," the duck figure, shown balanced on a trash can with lid held as a shield against a spray paint assault, was a mischievous character from D.C. Comics with whom LEE identified. Like a number of other site-specific murals he produced in the period, this was an invited commission arranged by the principal of the school.³ The mural's impact was strong enough to earn him commissions from several nearby schools. A few years later an order followed for a smaller-scale partial replica of Howard the Duck on canvas, which revealed the influence of commercial art's illusionistic techniques. Notes: 1 The literature on the history of New York City's graffiti movement in the 1970s is vast and often contradictory. A balanced overview is offered by Jack Stewart in his doctoral dissertation "M.T.A. -Mass Transit Art," New York University, 1989; excerpts were published as an article accompanying the 1997 Groniger Museum exhibition catalogue Graffiti: Coming from the Subway. 2 Many of the dealers and art-world figures involved in courting these young graffiti artists, who came predominantly from New York's poorer ethnic neighborhoods, faced accusations of having exploited them for gain and then withdrawing support when the art market for aerosol paintings grew cold in the 1980s. A few other notable efforts to rechannel "writing" off the tracks and into studios had preceded this period, however. For example, the 1972 organization of United Graffiti Artists (UGA) at City College, spearheaded by a streetwise sociology major named Hugo Martinez, gave graffiti writers an early forum for discussing craft aesthetics and for exhibiting their spray work on "legitimate" surfaces like background paper. By 1973 paintings by UGA members had broken into the Soho art world with a show at the Razor Gallery, which also toured elsewhere. The initial group disbanded in 1974, although Martinez remained active in promoting the movement's legitimizing ambitions. 3 In a telephone interview on October 14, 1998, LEE recalled that Corlears' art teachers were "upset" when he did the handball-court mural because "all the kids wanted to do was watch me paint, rather than pay attention to their school work." In 1979 he produced murals for other school playgrounds in the vicinity, the piece for P.S. 137 being titled Hell Never Dies.