On a scorching Thursday afternoon outside MoMA PS1, Lady Pink is in beast mode.
The graffiti legend is in the midst of painting a mural at the museum’s entrance—a surreal composition of a large stone foot perched next to an elevated subway platform, with a 7 train whooshing past and the Brooklyn skyline in the background. When I stopped by, Lady Pink had completed the mural’s base with brushes and was adding detail with spray paint. Her two assistants were finessing the foot, while she, perched on an elevated platform, was adding black shading to a subway car. Her concentration was unwavering.
“In the middle of work, I need to focus, focus, focus,” she told me in an earlier conversation over Zoom. “I’m in beast mode. I am moving. And it’s very challenging to be out on the street. When time is up, time is up; what you didn’t get done, it’s not getting done.”
Lady Pink working on the MoMA PS1 mural commission, June 12, 2025. Photo: Min Chen.
When completed and unveiled June 26, Lady Pink’s artwork will mark MoMA PS1’s inaugural mural commission, a new program that will invite artists to create outdoor works on the museum’s public-facing walls every year. For this first round, proposals poured in from more than 20 local organizations and partners, before Lady Pink was chosen for her “deep ties to Queens and our city,” said Connie Butler, the museum’s director.
“We’re excited to see our locality embedded in Lady Pink’s stunning commission, which will engage both our neighbors and passersby alike with its vivid imagery and synthesis of local histories,” she added in a statement.
Lady Pink’s art supplies, June 12, 2025. Photo: Min Chen.
The artist is indeed woven deep into the city’s graffiti history. Born in Ecuador and bred in Queens, Lady Pink began leaving her striking tags on subways cars from 1979, becoming the rare female graffiti writer in a male-dominated field (she, of course, shows up in Charlie Ahearn’s seminal 1982 film Wild Style). Her flair also showed up on her fine art canvases, in dreamlike scenes where an urban edge meets a pastel-hued romanticism. Today, her work is in the collections of institutions from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York to the Groningen Museum in the Netherlands.
Lady Pink’s connection to PS1 and its surrounds goes back decades as well. At age 17, she was included in the museum’s 1981 “New York/New Wave” group exhibition on downtown art, which featured works by some 100 artists including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Futura 2000, Maripol, and Andy Warhol. Returning to the museum, she said, was a “wonderful feeling.”
Lady Pink and her team working on the MoMA PS1 mural commission, June 12, 2025. Photo: Min Chen.
More significantly, the institution itself also once faced iconic graffiti spot 5Pointz. The former factory’s facade was transformed into an evolving outdoor art mecca by artists—Meres, Tracy 168, and Blade, among many others—who left behind tags and murals between the 1990s and 2010s. The structure was controversially demolished in 2013 to make way for a luxury development.
Revisiting the site where she too once painted murals, Lady Pink told me, entailed a “roller coaster of emotions.”
“It’s awful, it’s nice, it’s wonderful, it’s horrible,” she said. “It’s all of these things. I used to love that place, but now, I hate being there, because that building is no longer there.”
Lady Pink working on the MoMA PS1 mural commission, June 12, 2025. Photo: Min Chen.
Her mural duly pays tribute to the lost site. Derived from a previous painting, the composition’s concrete foot is loosely based on 5Pointz and comes adorned with the tags of artists who had worked on the building’s facade, mixed in with nods to graffiti pioneers. Zephyr and Eva 62 are represented, as are Mitch 77 and Vinny 3YB. “I kind of pay homage to the originators in that way,” she said.
For Lady Pink, her mural project at PS1 could help bring back some of the creative spirit that once thrived at 5Pointz. The site, she recalled, was where “folks from all over the world would come and paint at no charge, no expense, and no funding.” And the walls surrounding PS1, apart from the one holding Lady Pink’s new mural, stand invitingly bare.
Lady Pink, (2025) at MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Paneccasio, courtesy of MoMA PS1.
“I do wish that all the walls around PS1 were painted as 5Pointz used to be. That sheer energy is just so unique to New York,” she said. “I think that PS1 has the opportunity to expand and perhaps grow with that. This is just one wall, but the minute you say, ‘have a go at it,’ artists will beautify that neighborhood.”
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
