In the New York Times City Room blog, “Ask a Graffiti Artist,” this March Lee Quiñones, an artist who emerged from the subway art movement of the 1970s, responded to readers’ questions about his life, work and the evolution of graffiti as art in New York City. Asked about his relationship to Jean-Michel Basquiat he said: “Way back in 1979, a painter from Britain by the name of Stan Peskett generously let us share his vast downtown studio along with Fab Five Freddy, where we were able to create some of our first studio paintings. There was a massive collaborative painting between Basquiat and I that we created for one of the parties thrown there. Basquiat’s discussions with Fab and I were extensions of his writings on the streets, but I honestly always felt too detached to even connect the dots of his commentaries. Genius in the making in what is revered to be some kind of a radiant urgency.” Lee also had things of interest to say about the destruction of early graffiti murals, and his relationship with Keith Haring from 1981. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/answers-from-a-graffiti-artist-part-2/ Lee Quiñones was born in Puerto Rico in 1960, and grew up in New York’s Lower East Side. He was already known for his subway graffiti under the tag of Lee in late 1974 when he joined The Fabulous Five, a “wall writing group,” which also included the Brooklyn-based Fab-5-Freddy. In 1979 Lee, Fab 5, and Basquiat worked on some commissioned collaborative murals on tarps, now lost, in the same loft studio he mentions in the quote above. While Lee at the time was one of the more technically proficient of the spray painter graffitists, his looked more to commercial and airbrush art as models. Basquait and Fab 5 used to visit the Museum of Modern Art together, and discuss Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. In 1981 the three of them took part in the ground-breaking alternative art event "New York / New Wave," which tried to bring together graffiti, punk, and downtown avant garde art. Lee later started in Charlie Ahearn’s hip-hop film Wild Style, released in 1983. He moved on from subway cars to community murals and works on canvas, some now in the collections of the Whitney Museum and the New Museum of American Art. More on Lee can be seen in his site: http://www.leequinones.com. |