![]() This young lady, she can actually draw.Graffiti alphabet letters and styles for you from the best artists on the planet “My youngest kid, right now she’s twenty-four years old,” he said, and held up an iPhone to show off her illustration work, which she posts on Instagram. “Whatever graffiti I do now is legal,” he said, cryptically. In 2013, he was coaxed back into graffiti by some old friends. Perry stopped writing graffiti in 1979, and today works as a paralegal. (In “The ABCs of Style,” his lowercase “j” has the planet Jupiter for a dot.) He recalled growing up in a Manhattan housing project, and his friendship with Cliff 159, the leader of the 3 Yard Boys. Jester, was a bit older than the other writers in the group. “My mother was an excellent seamstress.” Behind him, the kids had started an impromptu, netless badminton game with a Ping-Pong ball.Ĭornelius Perry, a.k.a. Vanager grew up in Brooklyn and started drawing in notebooks when he was in junior high. Doc, pointed out his handiwork: three shape-shifting silver letters drawn on a corrugated metal wall. “In the seventies, they called them butlers.”įarther on, Christopher Vanager, a.k.a. “There’s a big tradition in graffiti of mentoring, of having an apprentice,” Dana explained. His patients include a number of graffiti writers when Squirm expressed interest in the craft, they connected him with Lethem, and the two now meet regularly for drawing lessons. Squirm’s father, Norman Turkowitz, a dentist with a practice on West Fifty-seventh Street, had come along, too. Keo-whose brother is the novelist Jonathan Lethem-had brought an apprentice: a sharp-eyed eight-year-old who goes by the street name Squirm. ![]() Lee-a former member of the Fabulous Five crew, known for his depiction of the comic-book character Howard the Duck-was accompanied by his ten-year-old son, Benicio. ![]() ![]() (These days, his work shows at the Venice Biennale.) Lee Quiñones, a.k.a. Crumb-inspired “ EAT SHIT” mural, in 1988. Reas-a graffiti writer famous for covering an entire subway car with an R. It’s important for kids to know where it came from.” She was accompanied by her own kids, ages eight and eleven, and her husband, Todd James, a.k.a. Dana Albarella James, the book’s co-author and publisher, explained, “The world is awash in this aesthetic. Each letter is drawn by a graffiti legend: “A” by Doc, “B” by Blade. The occasion was the publication of “ The ABCs of Style: A Graffiti Alphabet,” a Baby Einstein-like book for the streetwise set. The men, who are in their forties, fifties, and sixties, looked like hip dads, which many of them are, with scruffy salt-and-pepper beards, hoodies, and expensive sneakers. 62 building, on Grand Street, a hulking brick structure now called the Seward Park Campus. On a recent, drizzly Sunday, about half a dozen of the old masters gathered in the lobby of the former P.S. Graffiti now adorns the walls of museums from Brooklyn to Berlin, and sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auctions. In New York, bands of urchin-artisans took up Cornbread’s style-stick letters, tags-and made it an art form. According to lore, modern American graffiti began in the late nineteen-sixties, when a Philadelphia teen-ager named Darryl McCray started spray-painting his nickname, Cornbread, around the city, hoping to catch the attention of his crush.
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