Exhibition Walkthrough: Lee Quiñones and Sean Corcoran
Laura Hoptman: How many people have been to the Drawing Center before? Oh, good, a good number. All right. For those who haven't, we've been an institution for 50 years. We were founded by an assistant curator in the drawing department at MoMA. And I always say this when I introduce Martha Beck, our founder, because I too was an assistant curator in the drawing department at MoMA. So I'm following in some auspicious footsteps. She founded the institution in 1977 in a neighborhood where she lived and where all her friends lived as well. And we still are in the neighborhood after 50 years. So it's pretty great, and it's enormously exciting for me to be able to introduce these two fellows, Lee Quiñones and Sean Corcoran. I didn't have to look at the paper to say that, but I wanted also to mention and be thankful to our ASL interpreters, Kim Hale and Alyssa Beshear. Thank you so much for doing this for us today.
So first I'll introduce Lee Quiñones, a hero of mine since my East Village days at the Fun Gallery. Lee was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico and raised on the Lower East Side. You were raised in the East Village, weren't you?
Lee Quiñones: Lower, Lower
Laura Hoptman: Lower, where?
Lee Quiñones: Catherine, South Catherine
Laura Hoptman: Okay, so seriously Lower East Side. All right, so we can't claim you as an East Village artist. You are considered one of the most influential artists to emerge from the New York graffiti movement. When you made your first spray-paint mural in New York on the subways, you were just 14. So Lee eventually spray-painted murals on over 120 subway cars. And in 1980, he had his first solo show at the venerable White Columns, also over 50-year-old institution, a sister institution to us, no?
Lee Quiñones: Yes, in New York, but 1979 was my first show in Rome, Italy.
Laura Hoptman: Ah, so his first show was in Rome. The Italians were quicker than we were, at least to put him in a gallery, because he had been making art since he was 14. That's important to know. So the work was hanging on a wall for the first time in Rome in 1979. And in 1980, he was part of a piece of art history, that is, the Times Square Show, that was curated by Anton van Dalen and Jane Dickson, two artists who share this wall with Lee. Jane Dickson here, Anton van Dalen, who unfortunately we lost this summer. Jane's still alive and kicking, thank goodness.
Sean Corcoran, to my left, my colleague, is the senior curator of prints and photography at the Museum of the City of New York. Sean previously served as assistant curator of photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester. His exhibitions have included City as Canvas: New York Graffiti From the Martin Wong Collection, Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs, and the upcoming Above Ground Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection, which opens at the Museum of the City of New York on November 22nd. And I urge you all to go have a look at this wonderful show at a really fantastic museum.
After Sean and Lee's conversation, which they're going to be mobile, walking around, please join us in the bookstore where Lee will sign his new monograph, 50 Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond, which is a sweeping overview of your work over the past five decades. But there are two things there. There is a book that you can purchase with Lee's signature, which is a big deal, by the way, given that it's a rather important part of his drawing practice. So please join me in welcoming these two great guys. I'm so glad that they're here, Lee and Sean. Thank you.
Sean Corcoran: Okay, I think we're going to keep this pretty casual. If you want to ask a question during the talk, please, you're welcome to. But please just wait for a microphone, because it's being recorded, we want to get you on mic. We're going to actually start in the corner, where you can see a DONDI piece framed. So we'll let you guys make your way that way, and maybe Lee and I will scoot around the other way. Okay, we'll meet you over there. It will be a little bit hard for all of you to see some of the things we're talking about because they're in cases, but hopefully everyone will be able to cycle through at some point and take a close look at these things. I asked Lee to start here because I think this case, which is filled with the work of DONDI White, Donald White, who was a remarkable artist who began work on the trains in New York City from his ... He grew up in East New York in the mid-1970s, '74, '75 I think is when he started.
Lee Quiñones: No, he started just slightly after that, '76, 77.
Sean Corcoran: Yeah. Actually, we probably could get a pretty good sense from the first drawing over there. And one of the reasons I wanted to start here was, I thought this really showed his trajectory as an artist. I'm going to let Lee talk about the importance of black books, because I think you see every aspect of use of the black book or artist's sketchbook that was so important to the writing community. Can I turn it over to you for a minute.
Lee Quiñones: No, sure, sure. Yes, the black books, appropriately named because they were actually black on the outside, were these sketchbooks that came in various sizes. You'll see some of them here that are really as tiny as a pocket-sized black book and some that were not here, but they were as big as portfolios. So the more common size was more like the notebook-sized black book. And this basically gave you blank slates, blank canvas papers to actually make your preliminary drawings, your sketches, your doodles, but mainly real sketching. There weren't that many doodle pages because each page was precious, and some of these black books were, for lack of a better word, they were kind of borrowed, if you know what I mean. These are underprivileged, marginalized, young souls that didn't have any money, their families had no money, but they had a lot of ambition to create a persona for themselves using color, using attitude, and using their either given name, DONDI obviously, rest in peace, is working with his given name because his name was Donald White.
And so we used these books as sort of blueprint tablets that encompassed all of our drawings, but we also shared drawings with other artists. So it was a way of going to these little watering holes within the subway system to meet your heroes and meet your peers and your future partners and share ideas, share styles with each other, information about where not to go or to go. So these books were very, I would say, testimonials to the time, because it was a way of exchanging information in a pictorial way, and mainly in drawing.
Sean Corcoran: And again, hopefully you can all have a moment to take a look at this case. But what you see on the bottom left is, and even the top one, is his early work as he's developing his style. And then towards the middle a more mature, and in fact, the one in the dead center, I think it's got to be one of the sketches for a famous car he painted called Children of the Grave. I think that one is maybe ...
Lee Quiñones: Oh, that one?
Sean Corcoran: Yeah.
Lee Quiñones: Yeah, it might be. Actually, I've been around for a long time.
Sean Corcoran: Or it could be a recreation.
Lee Quiñones: No, I'm really good at what I call graffiti forensics. I can tell when something more or less was done year-wise because of the style and the crudeness and the hand. That is definitely, because DONDI grew up in east New York, but he grew up painting on the BMT Trains, on the Js and Ms, though he lived really close to the IRT division of the number two train out in New Lots. So DONDI was actually a BMT rider. And I'll tell you something funny about BMT, IRT, IND. There was a lot of discrimination going on. BMT and IND riders were labeled as not has-beens, but not important. And that wasn't right, because there were a lot of great riders that painted on the BMTs. I was one of them. But the big picture, the big time, the big museum, rolling museum, was the IRT, and then particularly the number four, the two, the four, and the five. So DONDI-
Sean Corcoran: Say why, because it went through everywhere you wanted to be seen.
Lee Quiñones: Well, yeah. I think a lot, I dream a lot, I still do to this day. But back then I realized that there were a number of reasons. The IRT, the number four and the five particularly, had the best painters in the whole movement because of this, because it traveled from the outskirts of east New York, Flatbush in some cases, through downtown Brooklyn, up to lower Manhattan, and up the corridor, the Golden Coast, Madison Avenue, Lexington Avenue. So Madison Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Museum Row, it's right there. In fact, it's the only trains that bring you to those museums. Then it would go up to the Boogie Down Bronx, and it would first snake through the south Bronx and then end up splitting to go either to the northeast Bronx or the northwest Bronx, closer to White Plains, Westchester. So I figured out early on that that was a perfect avenue of exposure to a host of many people, the underprivileged, challenged neighborhoods of east New York.
And where some of these paintings were created, DONDI working in that area, now would snake through these very sophisticated and privileged neighborhoods, Madison, Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue. So I figured I want, aside from my own contemporaries seeing my work, I want all of New York to see my work. And this was the perfect line. Plus, those IRTs, fours and fives and twos, had a certain mechanical attitude to them. They weren't soft and they weren't pushovers. I really believed that the trains had their own characteristics by virtue of the neighborhoods that they went through or originated at or ended, and particularly just the way they snaked through the city. So yeah.
Sean Corcoran: And then as a result, we're digressing a bit here, but as a result, then the places where all the riders benched and met up was often along that line, 149th Street and Concourse, Atlantic Avenue.
Lee Quiñones: Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn Bridge.
Sean Corcoran: Yeah.
Lee Quiñones: So where a lot of these books were actually exchanged, sometimes stolen, sometimes bumrushed like, "I'm taking your book," not much of that was going on, but there was a peaceful exchange of ideas happening at these watering holes. We used to call them benches. The reason why, someone in the system, in the movement, would figure out what's the best vantage point, the best station to sit down on a bench and watch the trains come through through two consecutive rush hours. So that became the speakeasies, what's the name of the famous bar where Jackson Pollock and them always used to ... Cedar Tavern.
Sean Corcoran: Cedar Tavern, yeah.
Lee Quiñones: So it was a great place for all these young souls to come and meet each other and look at each other's books. And these books also served as influences for more novice, what we used to call toy riders, which were riders that were not as experienced, that were just coming into the system. And they would see someone's style and they would say, "Wow, that D is so nasty, so great. I'm going to copy that D and apply it to my name that has a D." So it was a great way to bite off of each other, or we used to say biting, which happens a lot today in corporate America. Everyone just steals each other's ideas and makes it their own.
So all these places were peppered along, most of them were peppered along the twos, the fours, and the fives. And the farthest one was 188th Street and Morris Park. Then it was 149th Street, Grand Concourse, which was the most famous infamous one. And then there was Brooklyn Bridge, which was a bench that I started in 1975, '76, because it was two blocks away from my home. And then it was Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Again, the two, the four, the five, and the three and Atlantic Avenue. So you could see all these trains and catch up to your own work. Yeah.
Sean Corcoran: Right, because you could paint in the yard, and then in the morning go sit at the bench and eventually your train would roll out and through.
Lee Quiñones: Yeah, all this was done in secrecy, in the dark, late at night, against many odds. And then you wondered who was going to be your audience. The audience was the city of New York ridership. So you would go to these benches to catch up to that train when it's in service the next morning, sometimes without sleep like I did, I still don't sleep, nocturnal. And you would catch up to that train and either photograph it to document it or just say, "There it is, there's my work." So it was a real-time exposure to your work with you and your peers. But to me, like I was saying earlier, that I was more interested in the ridership, the people that could be art dealers and art collectors and art curators, and just the average person going to work that morning or home that evening, that they would experience something in such an unorthodox way.
And that's what led to the discovery of my work, believe it or not, having that notion that this is bigger than us and our little benches, that this is more about the city of New York, which to me was the world. Yeah.
Sean Corcoran: Okay, digression. We'll try to get back on subject here. One of the really nice things about this case in particular is, so you see his early style, a more mature and more, let's say wild style by the time you get here. But also interesting is then you see different sides of his work. You see a piece like this, which was made to hang in a gallery, made to be sold to a collector. In fact, this is a drawing for the invitation of, I think, his show at 51X, which was a small gallery downtown. But also interesting, in here you see some of his commercial work. He did the lettering, the words, for Malcolm McLaren's album Buffalo Gals and Duck Rock. So these were made, and if you go by the 12-inch single, actually probably on the 45 too, his lettering is there and used in production. So you see a whole trajectory and different ways in which his artwork was used for the trains, for the art market, gallery scene, and also a commercial application.
Lee Quiñones: Yeah. DONDI Was very fascinated with anatomy, and he loved drawing figures and making lines, linear lines and stuff. So did Futura, by chance. But DONDI was really, really fixated with bringing up his status and also developing his style. Because again, the IRTs, once you landed there, you'd better bring your best game. Because if not, you're being shunned to the back of the bus, stage left, see you, next. So it was really an editing system in the IRTs, where you need to be well versed and well rehearsed with your work, or else don't come here. Because there was a level of respect that you needed to apply and to assert when you was on IRTs. If not, you may never see your work again, because other painters that had a higher level of seniority or talent would just paint over your paint. And once you do that, it's detrimental. That's like someone just erasing your existence.
Sean Corcoran: So Lee, you mentioned design, and I know you meant this in a broader sense, but I'm thinking there's the work of a few individuals here who really bring design into the practice. And I think of DONDI's design, I think of firm, straight lines. He used architectural paper sometimes, he brought that kind of precision into his art. But then we have people like Futura and Hayes, who have, design is also at the core of what they do. So I wonder if you might want to say a few words. Because we have Futura, Hayes, and Futura here.
Lee Quiñones: Yeah, sure. So some graffiti artists, it's funny that I tried to get into art and design and I failed. I don't know how that happened, but some of these artists were going to art schools. I don't think Hayes here or Futura ended up in art school, but we were surrounded by a lot of graffiti riders that were students in art schools. And they gravitated to a lot of the album art at the time. I myself was influenced a lot by comic book culture, DC Comics, Marvel Comics. I was interested a lot in the advertisements that were inside the subway cars when they used to actually have paper advertisements. And just in general, the stimulation, the muse that New York brings. You're just always interested in what people were saying, what they're doing. Hayes in particular was very much into, it's all about perfecting your persona, perfecting your image. And having the straightest line was so, so important in graffiti, in the graffiti culture. Having a drip was like, no, never have a drip with spray paint. That's a no-no.
Though 30 years before, Jackson Pollock is dripping paint everywhere. So the expressionistic expressions were very different because we were coming from challenged backgrounds, wanting to spit-shine our image. So you think about the psyche behind that. I come from really challenging backgrounds against all odds, and I want to create something that's so perfected. The name has to be sharp and straight and powerful looking. So Futura was very much into, I figured out Futura went into the US Navy very early on, and he was on a US carrier out in the Pacific right at the tail end of Vietnam. So I said to myself, "Wow, he must have been watching those translucent boards where they're figuring out all their longitude, they're figuring out a big ocean body."
Lee Quiñones: Or they're figuring out a big ocean, a body of water. And I think that you could see some of that in figuring, the mapping out of where you are, where you're at. Hayes, who turned out to be an incredible designer and artist himself, also started designing album covers, which would lead on to LL Cool J and a number of hip hop personalities later on. I can't remember them off the top of my head-
Sean Corcoran:He told me not that long ago, he was showing work in galleries and things like that. And he said at a certain point he decided... He did go to SVA eventually, like 82 or 83, and he said, "I like galleries, but I think this is where my direction is." And it really did end up going into graphic design. And yeah, he did the classic logo for LL Cool J. [inaudible] did a version as well, but a version of the Beastie Boys logo. A lot of work for Def Jam, and I think Cold Chillin' is the labels he worked for. And then of course, he went on to be one... Both guys were really instrumental in the foundation of streetwear and streetwear design a little later in 80s.
Lee Quiñones: Along with Stash.
Sean Corcoran: It's Stash, definitely Stash.
Lee Quiñones: With Carmela, who is here. Triple Five Soul, putting her on the spot. Amazing. I mean, I think we started to figure out a time where we were partially grown up and that we needed to make capital and that we needed to make a new statement other than what we had exhausted on the subways. I, myself was showing paintings at 19 years old in Rome, Italy, where I had my first show along with Fab 5 Freddy, Fred Brathwaite. And we figured out like, wow, we cannot only create something that is dear and that we love, but that we can actually survive to keep our lights on, both at home and in the studio environment. So it was a blessing that came to us by sheer perseverance of continuing your craft against all odds. I had a lot of fingers pointed at me by parents and police officers and police officers are retired or passed on now. Parents are shameful [inaudible 00:26:34]. Now their kids are in jail.
And I felt... And it's sad because they didn't discover what I did, which was how to preserve yourself, true art. And those were tough times. And now we're in tough times again, politically and all. So the art will always survive and always be the voice of the people. But these guys, you could see that they were getting into the commercial side of art and enabling them now to buy their supplies instead of borrowing or lifting, whatever you want to call it. I called it rescue missions. I rescued spray cans that were dusty, hadn't been shaken in 50 years. I'm like, you're coming home to daddy, boom, boom, boom. Anyway, and Crash here is another and Daze...
Sean Corcoran: So yeah. So here for Crash, these are definitely subway outlines that were cut out of books. And in fact, actually, he even writes on a few of these, my fourth piece. He's noted when these were day two and when they were painted on a train. I have a couple of things I want to get your thoughts on here. First, I want to say Daze did go to the School of Art and Design.
Lee Quiñones: He did?
Sean Corcoran: Crash was an early, I don't want to say... I'm not actually... I don't want to say about his writing. He was actually an early curator of the art form and that he curated one of the first exhibitions at Fashion Moda in the Bronx called Graffiti Art Success for America, which brought downtown and citywide writers together in a group exhibition. But I have a couple of things I want to ask you about. One is kind of blockbuster style versus wild style, and point out that Daze, somebody who did go to the School of Art and Design is doing, in this case, the specials, a ska band from the UK at the time, but he's also starting to do figurative work. But what I wanted to ask you about wild style versus blockbusters, things like that, but then materials, because we have a nice range of materials used to make these drawings.
Lee Quiñones:
Well, I mean they're using traditional, some like Daze is using rapidograph markers here, ink pens, and then some of these are watercolor buffalo markers, and then there's alcohol based markers. That stuff really, I mean, it smelled good. It stunk up a storm. My room was like... Yeah, it was pretty combustible. The difference between... So blockbuster was actually, I think it came from the idea... Yeah, blockbuster would be something that was very legible and larger than life. So based on films. Remember blockbusters, when real blockbusters were out? I seem to remember them, Star Wars, Jaws, Chinatown, all these films. I'm a film buff. Was to create your name as big as possible, because when the trains would exit out of the tunnel into the elevated system, you could see it blocks away. So you busted the blocks. So blockbuster was that type of term that was given to those. Also, when they were in the stations they were so massive that they were overwhelming.
So these names were huge, like the S in Crash's name would be as big as these three desks as you're covering 52 feet long of subway car, length of a subway car. So several writers really took... They practiced that more than others. Blade was one of them. Blade One from the Northeast Bronx, he's on the last case here. But what really interesting to me about blockbusters is that they're very legible and they're very pyramid-like. I'm lost for words today. But where wild style is more about creating this discussion between different letters that become almost lifelike. They're almost creating characters to them. So when you have the average... If you have the average... I'm going to try to do it backwards. The average R, it's very kind of like lame and tame, but when you add a little kick to that last part of the R, now you're giving it a calligraphy life. You're giving it some dance, some style.
Unlike some politicians that can't dance, most of them can't dance. I think Kamala can dance. But I think that it was to add style and to add attitude to the name, and to actually interlock the letters so that they're almost having a heated discussion with each other, and they create this persona about a name. It becomes more mysterious because it's very hard to read. It's very unlegible and very menacing because of that. Whereas when I was doing entire whole car murals, I was creating the name to be legible because I wanted people to know who created that car. So the name was more pyramid-like. And for that, it gave me status as a very powerful and larger-than-life person. But I was probably 5'3 when I was 16 years old. And my cars were 7 feet tall, 52 feet wide, 120 of them or so. So lots of work over a 10-year period. And we just all developed lanes for ourselves, and it was beautiful in the making.
Sean Corcoran:
Let's talk about another lane. Do you mind if we move down a little here? So we have a couple different lanes here. Rammellzee, Phase 2, and Blade One. Three very intriguing... And this is also a Phase 2 here. Three seminal figures in the writing movement. Three people taking very different approaches and approaches that changed over time as well. Here we have Blade, a nice beautiful case of Blade's original sketches. And for him, I mean, he did a lot of blockbusters and he did some very intricate lettered pieces. But for me personally, what I'm taken with Blade is the kind of surrealism of the characters he brought to his cars. He was a whole car specialist. He did a lot of whole cars, but he did these characters that seem to have come out of nowhere, whereas a lot of artists would incorporate comic book characters, Ralph Bakshi or Vaughn Bodē, and we'll probably see some of that stuff a little later. These seem to be very original creations, very basic in their technical ability, but really imaginative.
Lee Quiñones:
Yes, he was not afraid. Blade was not afraid of just being very improvising and creating his own personal reality. So he was very much into intergalactic existence. And I could safely say that each and every drawing here became one of his cars. Because I remember some of these vividly, and these are very special drawings. I mean, everything here is very special, but these guys are living proof of... I believe that these drawings were a way of us to, at least for myself, speaking for myself, I made these very colorful drawings that we'll see shortly that made me feel that I was very invincible, that I could pull this off. So you had to almost believe in it before you saw it, as opposed to seeing it to believe it. So he painted probably for over 20 years on the trains, and he was one of my influences. He was amongst a couple of them that were my influences. When I saw his cars, I was like, wow, I need to-
Sean Corcoran:
He made you raise your game, right?
Lee Quiñones:
Yeah, raise the game. Now, whereas going back to wild style and blockbuster, these are more legible. And Blade had his hand at sort of getting a little wild with his work. He was very much influenced by rock music. He was in a band, he had his own band, funk, jazz, kind of rock band and stuff. But you see Rammellzee here and Phase, I mean, look at that. That is a full on brawl happening between letters. There is war going on there. And they may be... And that probably says... It'll take me a while to decipher, but it might say Phase, just Phase, not even with a number, but this was his way of making these mechanical sort of parts, almost like a mountain of rubble. But it was a mountain of feelings and emotions. And that's where I feel the... I've had discussions with the late Rammellzee where he thought about the letters, the alphabet as being armed and dangerous. It was a pretty interesting concept because-
Sean Corcoran:
You can see rockets and things coming off of his-
Lee Quiñones:
Yeah, the arrows.
Sean Corcoran:
Yeah.
Lee Quiñones:
Everything is about movement on a moving object. The subway car is moving, but when it stops, the work never stops moving because there's always an arrow. There's always a direction either up or down. And I think that that was part of the existence, the atmosphere that you came from. I grew up in the projects, Buck Wild, and I saw a lot of things, and I could have expressed that in this fashion, but I decided to do it big and broad and to create a political language behind it too. So we were all finding our lanes. This is another Rammellzee masterpiece. And these arches here are a mirror image of where he grew up in the ar-
Sean Corcoran:
They the arches of the elevated in the Rockaways.
Lee Quiñones:
The elevated in the Rockaways. And Knock came up with a famous phrase, and it's a beautiful phrase, and I got another one to follow up on that one. He said, "Everyone has their own arrow and everyone has their own direction, whether it's going that way or going up. So it's all a portraiture of your life." And I came up with a recent... And it's sort of like, oh, you said that? So the way I say it is that I am not going to be a bow for your arrow. My arrow is the direction I want to go in. So I'm not going to be your bow for your dreams and your direction and your arrow. I'm going to be my own bow and arrow. So I really truly believe that this is not just about style. It's not about being the most unlegible and the most wild. It's really speaking emotions here. This is Pollock, but in alphabet form. Rammellzee said, "I want to arm the alphabet. I want to arm the letters." And he's right, because now we're arming language. Everything is weaponized. Anything you say-
Sean Corcoran:
I was just going to say, he called it gothic futurism. And it was based on the idea of gothic illuminated letters. That was the basis of the inspiration. But then as you were saying, he took it further with, these letters need to defend themselves. They need to have their own place in this world and not be co-opted by corrupt individuals.
Lee Quiñones:
Yeah. Going back to the beginnings of language on how you create that lane of communication, and this is a very sophisticated way, and here's another... This is Phase 2, right?
Sean Corcoran:
Yeah. So Phase 2 was kind of there at the dawn of writing and often credited with being amongst the, if not, amongst the originators of certain styles.
Lee Quiñones:
Along with Riff.
Sean Corcoran:
Definitely along with Riff 170. And many of those styles were much more legible and partially maybe because it was early in the trajectory of the movement. But here you have work made 10 to 15 years later. This was eventually a flyer for a jazz show at Fashion Moda. But you can see at this point, he doesn't care if you can read a word out of this or not. And what I wanted to ask you about is when did you decide to make work for each other as opposed to the public? You know what I mean? Meaning sometimes you would make a blockbuster piece, which the entire world could see and read, and you could communicate maybe or something like Stop the Bomb, like a real political idea that you wanted everybody who saw that train car to go by to understand, but then with wild style sometimes... But as artists became even more abstract or maybe just communicating to one another rather than to the broader world. Do you have any thoughts on that and the movement away from even letter forms?
Lee Quiñones:
I think as early as 1976 is where wild style really started to anchor itself. And there was a seismic shift at that time, and that I think a lot of individuals in the scene felt like they needed to move everything up a notch because everything developed, all of this developed within three to four years, maybe less, from the crew tag in the middle of the night, not having any light to the most elaborate masterpieces done in the middle of the night. And at that point, I think we all realized, at least just by virtue of the whole car, the whole car is a special celebration. It's not a happy accident. It's a very calculated rendering that goes into it. Planning, logistics, sneaking in and out of your own home or into the yards, all the stuff that goes on before the paint starts to hit the surface. And then after that, the documentation.
So that's at that point when you start to realize, I started to realize this is something beyond myself. This is something that I want to continue to create a dialogue with my contemporaries, that we can't just stay stagnated in one place just because we can get away with it, is that we can move on and bring it to the next level. What that level was, I wasn't aware, but I knew I was going to paint for the rest of my life. I remember one time thinking to myself, well, I'm going to paint trains for the rest of my life. And that was only on the heels of that, I wanted to create art for the rest of my life.
So the only venue, the only vehicle, the vessels that I had at my disposal were the subways. And it was such a genius conceptual act that in itself was a performance act because you did this under the cover of darkness and anonymous way, and then the next day all of New York saw it and yet did not know who's behind this, how did this happen, why, when, where, all those things. So I kind of kept people on their heels for a little bit.
Sean Corcoran:
And just to kind of follow up on the planning and preconception, if you look at some of these outlines, they'll even say with a little arrow to them, what color is going to be this part? What color is going to be this part? So it's all laid out before they even get there. That said, some people would just go in and freestyle and do whatever, but many people did plan everything out.
Lee Quiñones:
I made lists just like Blade has here, where you would figure out... Mind you, just think about this idea. You want to do a beautiful masterpiece. You already have the colors in your head. You don't have them in front of you. You have to go and borrow them from various stores all around the city. So you have to go to the stores, Martin Paints or something, or Pergament, and say, I know they have school bus yellow there. So you go there and you get your three cans of school bus yellow that you need for one part of the painting. Oh, they don't have black. I got to go to that store across town and get four cans of that black and purple.
And so you're like a ping pong ball all over the city just to create one masterpiece. And then it's all figured out in the yard and under the conditions of, if I don't have enough of that school bus yellow, I am a failure. So you have to be on your game. You had to be. It's like not having enough ink in your pen to sign that check or whatever. It's like you need to know-
Sean Corcoran:
There was no second chance. If you didn't finish it, you would never get a chance at that car again.
Lee Quiñones:
Right. The train would leave the next morning. It's in service. It's a failure. It's like not knowing your lines on a Broadway play. You're just like, hum hum. You just lost for... So you went there with a plan to execute and survive and then achieve your goal. So everything had to be, as you can see, five cans of black and three cans of federal safety purple, all these colors that peppered all over the city. And I have many lists of that.
Sean Corcoran:
People don't know you guys were all color theorists, right?
Lee Quiñones:
Yeah.
Sean Corcoran:
You're working out your colors, combinations.
Lee Quiñones:
I was a ninja. I would've to say I was a ninja. I'm fascinated by Japanese culture particularly samurai and ninja culture. But I took a lesson from that.
Sean Corcoran:
Well, we've talked about several other of your contemporaries, but now we get to jump across the hall and take a look at a nice selection of your work made-
Lee Quiñones:
And ask questions anytime you... Feel free to ask questions in between.
Sean Corcoran:
Yeah, if you want to ask a question.
Speaker 1:
It's on topic and off but it's a two-part question. I'll make it quick. First, I'd like to know a little bit about the different crews and how they played the role. So you was in Fab 5, I don't know if they were part of your production, or how that organization works. And then I'm working with a lot of young people today, and there's 20 or 30 different paint can companies, large scale Marios. It's just amazing what the next generation is doing. So those are kind of my two questions. What were the crews, the organization of the crews, and how you feel about today, the work going out today?
Lee Quiñones:
Well, it's about community, art has always been about community, creating a community, a circle of people that you can trust, around you. Back in the sixties, people were in groups, some radical, some not. I mean, let's just face it, street gangs was a way of keeping some kind of community going in the streets. And obviously it went into ... it got violent at times, but I think the intent was to have a family structure around you. The same thing happened, bled over to the graffiti culture, of creating a crew, or a group, or what would you say? Like an arsenal of many talents. Some groups were very specific, sort of almost on the fringes of being exclusive. You can't join this group because you're not good enough. You haven't perfected your craft yet. So there was some really cool groups, by the names such as the Fantastic Partners, the Ebony Dukes, the Crazy Five, the Killers, all these things, and killing meaning bombing the system, killing the system. Off the top, the Fabulous Five. There were some really, really cool ones.
Speaker 1:
What about the INDs? I heard they were really important. Can you just-
Lee Quiñones:
Just, oh yeah. The INDs, you know, the Soul Stone Brothers, and BMTs. The Prisoners of Graffiti. When I heard that, when I was 14, I was like, what? The Prisoners of Graffiti? What commitment, what more of a commitment can you have? Remember, this was all in light of television, cultural pop culture, just exploding in the sixties. So we were very enamored and influenced by what was going on in TV culture, in film culture, and advertisement culture. So we took the names from all these anonymous figures, Superman and Batman. I really wasn't a Batman, or a Spider-Man, or Superman. I liked the Fantastic Four, and Howard the Duck.
So I always went off the beaten path, but it was those things that we attached ourselves too, to feel like that we have some kind of organization. We had self-agency and self-worth, in numbers, strength in numbers, and at the same time, you can influence each other. I remember one time in early '75, 1975, someone telling me, "Hey Lee, the A tunnel, where they park, A trains is hot, don't go." But I did. Then I seen it written on the wall, A train, no, the tunnel is hot. Go back. It was spray painted on the wall, and it was a warning like, "Hey, it was either a warning or a way of diverting traffic through there." So I was like, wow, someone went through the expense, and the extent of writing, the layup is hot. Go back. So there was a camaraderie that you felt in groups, and in phase, working with a number of guys back in the day, and some young women that were involved in the movement as well. They were so sophisticated, so ahead of their time, that we still haven't figured them out yet.
Sean Corcoran:
That's right.
Lee Quiñones:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
And then what about today's artists...
Lee Quiñones:
Yeah, today's artists, I'll keep it short up as I've probably talked too much, but I mean everyone is trying to figure out a new lane. Obviously in the commercial world, there's more of popular culture accepting, and grasping onto this culture, because they realize that there's a lot of power in it. It is the biggest art movement in the history of mankind, because it's global. It's global. People tell me, did you ever see this coming, back in the day? I was like, shit, New York was the world.
It still is to me in some ways, but I was like, nothing is bigger than New York. And I was dead wrong. The world was waiting for something like this, because it captured the imaginations of many youth. I've never seen so many young women involved in an art movement, like this movement. And some of them will burn you off the stage. And I'm proud to say that, because like, wow, these young women are doing their homework, and they're putting in their own cogs, in the big wheel of things. They're spinning the wheels, as well. And some of them, I'm like, yo, I don't even want to get close to her, she'll just roast me off the stage. Mind you, there's style and technique, that's all one thing, but one thing I'm proud of is concept. Concept and vibes.
Sean Corcoran:
Well, that actually is the perfect transition to talk about what's here on the wall. And I wonder, I have a question or two to get you going, and then let's just let you muse on some of this stuff, and where it fits into your story. But some of these clear ... one, were these drawn as ideas for potential whole cars, because they're obviously laid out as whole car trains. And then at the time, did you think of these as almost like comic strips? Because this is what it feels like here. And then, two, it's kind of similar here. Some of these look like they were designed for trains, but then some of these other pieces look just like, work your imagination and beyond. And I also just want to point out for everybody, you'll notice that, while a lot of people were sketching out ideas in black books, you're doing something very different here. These are multiple pages taped together, oversized paper. You're very clearly planning these out, in a much more elaborate way than even the most elaborately sketched black book piece. Okay, spin the top. Let you go.
Lee Quiñones:
The yo-yo ... Sparks. Yeah. These right here were blueprints for future whole cars that I was planning at the time. Some of them did become whole cars, some did not. So this top one here was actually ... I have the original drawing to this. It's in full color, just like these, but I was going to bring it back. I was going to revisit it, in 1980. I just wanted to bring it back. Because I thought that 1980 was a turning point, an inflection point, in the whole movement that now we were moving on, beyond the trains. So it was originally called Born Again, and it was basically giving birth to a new segment in the movement. So I'd never made the second version, because I just never got to it. This I never got to do on a train, but it was about to, I came very close to doing this car, and this was, funny enough, very prophetic.
I mean, just thinking about the USSR at the time, and the USA, exchanging ... having a nuclear exchange, that was always on my mind. I was haunted, since I was a child, because I grew up in the Cold War era. So I was afraid of both Vietnam, that I was going to go there, because I thought it was a passage of manhood. It was an act that happened forever, just go, you either get killed or not. That was me thinking. So it was terrifying, and then terrifying that there were these missiles coming, overhead, because old men cannot figure it out on a round table.
And then this one I was really proud of. This one was also going to become a car, and I never got to do it, but I did this in a painting, and this was the original concept. I was going to do this whole painting on a wall, inside of a deserted subway station, and I just did not do it. So I ended up doing this one, on the Worth Street station downtown, and I did the whole thing. And the funny story behind this, it was just a plain wall, maybe a little shorter than this wall, not so tall. I painted this entire ... I brought this into the tunnel, and painted it. It was in the dark. And the very next week or so, the work ... we used to call them work bums. There were the track workers. You see them with the glow in the dark. They're dirty, they're just carrying hammers and all. They were working on the tracks from Brooklyn Bridge to Canal Street, and they had these lights, these work lights, that are very bright, like six or seven really intense light bulbs on each track. And they came, and on each side of the wall, they lit the piece up. So it was a dark station, that you had to really look hard from the train, as you passed it. And here was this big lit presentation.
Sean Corcoran:
Cool.
Lee Quiñones:
So it was like, that really lit me up in a good way. I was like, yeah, I'm in the right direction.
Sean Corcoran:
You got the MTA track workers' respect.
Lee Quiñones:
Co-sponsorship right there.
And this one I created on a subway car. Some of them I remember the colors vividly. I created this on a train project that we did, called the Art Train. The Art Train that we did in Detroit, which was a freight train, converted into a rolling museum. And this one was a whole car in 1981. This was a whole car in ... maybe it might've been 1981, '82. This one was also another revisit to a train I did in 1975, based on the Soul Train. So I had this locomotive with all these beautiful colors, I created in 1975, just as I was starting my big all city tour of whole cars. And then some of these, this became part of a whole car, but none of the surroundings did. But this skull right here was on one of my handball courts that I created in 1980. The Lion Wall, the lion's den, that skull is in the far left side, but nothing else came of it, maybe a few ... I always painted cemeteries, because I felt like my whole neighborhood, as beautiful as it was, it was a cemetery, in a way.
Sean Corcoran:
I noticed, this is 1979, this is like that time period. That's also when you began showing your work in galleries. So I'm wondering where you see these, as in terms of the overlap, and shifting direction, having multiple maybe modes of thinking, or being pulled, still riding on a train, starting to think about, okay, what can I do on a canvas? Making preparatory sketches for that kind of stuff. Where did these kind of fall, in that crossing trajectory?
Lee Quiñones:
They were very different from each other. I was more aware of what I wanted to project on a canvas that would stay still, beyond sitting on someone's private wall, or on a gallery, or in a museum. So it was a different dynamic to it, because you could do this on a train, and it would come to life with the movement of the train. So all these figures, this dragon here, this medieval dragon would all of a sudden come to life, moving-
Sean Corcoran:
As it was moving, yeah.
Lee Quiñones:
... As it was moving. That was the beauty about subways, that characters came to life. But on a canvas, I wanted to have a more sophisticated ... not that this wasn't, but I wanted to have more of a sophisticated venture into, I knew it was a different world, so it was a little nerve wracking for me, the transition from trains to canvas, took me over almost two years to actually digest that pill, and say, "Yeah, I'm a painter. I'm a painter, and the subways are my path, and that's the chapter that I have to turn the page." So it was very difficult, because I was in love with the trains.
It saved my life, it gave me a sense of self, and I felt ... well, I grew up with a host of different characters in my neighborhood. Some of them didn't make it to their early twenties. Some of them were really beautiful, talented. One of them could have been an Olympic swimmer. One of them could have danced all the stars off the stage. And I remember, I was always a scruffy kid. I'm the guy in the Peanuts character, what's his name? With the flies that are like-
Sean Corcoran:
Pig Pen?
Lee Quiñones:
Pig Pen. I love him. I love him, and I love the guy that lives in the garbage can in Sesame Street, Oscar, right? Love him. He's just dirty and scrappy. I love that kind of ... I've always gravitated to those type of guys, the misfits. And for that reason, girls weren't feeling me.
They're like, "That dude's dirty. He smells like a tunnel." But years later, one of these guys is looking at me in front of my building, and he's looking at me up and down. He's been in and out of jail several times, very talented, good looking, striking guy. I'm like, "You should be on a Donna Karan poster. I mean billboard right now." But he looks at me up and down, and I'm looking at him. I'm like, is this guy sizing me up? I was like, you trying to size me up? I'm saying to myself, so in my mind, I'm like, you've been in and out of jail, but I've been out here, don't come here. The moon is very full. I grew up in the same neighborhood, this was me just thinking. But then he says, "Lee, you're so lucky. You're so lucky that you made it."
And I thought it was a sincere thing that he was trying to say, but I was like, there's no luck on my side. It's all hustle, and it's all like going by a vibe. My vibe was to survive. And I said to him ... and then I got sarcastic. I said, "Listen, while you were chasing girls, I was getting chased by cops, chasing my dreams." And I stunned him, he couldn't ... I just put it into perspective for him. We all have our lanes, we pick our legacies, but sometimes, something just drives you like a magnet. And even if I could have hung out in that crowd and been part of the It crew, I was like, no, I want to be in those tunnels. I want to create work for millions of people, and to create an influence. And that was my drive. And I think he was just stunned to hear that I was trying to keep us both on an even ... I wasn't trying to be above him, or below him. And I told him, "You can start your life right now," at whatever age he was. I was 40 something. I said, "You could start it right now." So yes.