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    Martin Wong, Medici of the Aerosol Art Set

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    A patron saw the beauty in graffiti when most of the world thought it was mere nuisance. Now the writing (of Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee, Futura and others) is on the museum wall.Martin Wong got in with the graffiti writers in the early 1980s at Pearl Paint, the long-gone Canal Street art supply store, where he had a job in the canvas department. Wong would slip them markers or cans of spray paint or sell them supplies on deep, unsanctioned discounts, which endeared him to artists at crucial moments of their careers. The painter Lee Quiñones recalls Wong writing out $20 invoices for portrait-quality linens priced at $400.Wong soon began buying Quiñones’s work and that of like-minded painters like Daze, Sharp and A-One — artists who were moving away from bombing trains with graffiti and developing studio practices. In so doing, he nurtured their development and became a constructive patron: a Cosimo de’ Medici of the aerosol set. His collection is highlighted in “Above Ground,” a small but essential exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.By 1994 Wong had amassed upward of 300 artworks and other media, all of which he donated to the museum that year. As interest in both the modern graffiti movement and its diasporic reverberations has grown, Wong’s conviction has proved consequential, his collection functioning as a repository. Pieces from it have been lent to major institutional surveys, like “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation” at the MFA Boston and “Art in the Streets” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, shows that have deepened scholarship of this previously maligned and misunderstood period.Outsiders had been hot on graffiti at the same time as Wong was, but none had a more ardent or abiding interest. He recognized what was an irreducible form of American expressionism and its importance in the history of New York, even as much of the city was hostile toward it.Wong was 32 when he arrived in New York from San Francisco in 1978 and was drawn immediately to the baroque layers of tags spreading across the city’s surfaces. Wong’s own art, an urban realism that synthesized documentarian detail and romantic devotion (no artist lavished more attention on bricks), had little technical overlap but shared a sympathetic kinship. His paintings referred to the street, and so invariably referred to graffiti too. He reproduced the Lower East Side’s tagged handball courts and crumbling redbrick tenement buildings as oppressive but softened, bathed in a dingy cast that can feel like ecstatic reverie.From left, Wicked Gary, a graffiti writer; Peter Broda, the director of the Museum of American Graffiti; Martin Wong, the collector; and Lazar, a graffiti writer, at the opening of the Museum of American Graffiti in 1989. Behind them is a collection of 1970s writers’ tags.via Museum of the City of New YorkWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      When Banksy Came to Red Hook and Made His Mark

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      A chunk of wall that bears the work of the graffiti artist will go on display in Manhattan this month.Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about what happened to a 7,500-pound chunk of a wall with a Banksy installation from 2013. We’ll also get details on a request from Mayor Eric Adams’s lawyer for a federal judge to hurry a decision on whether to drop corruption charges against the mayor.Guernsey’sA dark-colored van parked down the block from Vassilios Georgiadis’s nondescript warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, one evening in 2013. Georgiadis, a roofing and asbestos abatement contractor, noticed it because he was standing outside, smoking.He told the man who got out of the van that it was not a good idea to leave it in that spot. Tractor-trailers turning the corner too fast could clip the car, Georgiadis said.The man said he would not be there long. He said something about how he just wanted to run to a convenience store nearby for cigarettes and coffee. Georgiadis told him to pull into an empty space in the driveway outside the warehouse. The man did and headed off. The van was still there when Georgiadis left a little while later.Georgiadis worked at home the next day, and then took some paperwork to his son Anastasios, who spent the day on a roofing job on Staten Island, ignoring calls from his mother.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Angelina Jolie Wants to Pick Up Where Warhol and Basquiat Left Off

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      It was a Saturday night, and behind the graffiti-scrawled facade of Atelier Jolie, her downtown creative space and gallery, Angelina Jolie was in conversation with the artist Shirin Neshat.The topics were heady: the plight of refugees, the rights of women, how to wrench meaning from exile; the value of art in all that. Jolie, ethereal in a cream dress with an embroidered capelet, was gracious. “I’m so happy to be with all of you,” she said to the invited 50 or so guests, adding that she sought community to “keep trying to understand ways to help.” For her, being an artist was a means of communication: “I want to know if you feel the same pain.”Jolie listened intently to Neshat, the Iranian visual artist and filmmaker, a striking figure with kohled eyes. “Art doesn’t come from intuition,” Neshat said. “It has to come from the life you have led. It has to relate to the world.”At the reception, notables like the musician Jon Batiste and the author Suleika Jaouad (his wife), and Jack Harlow, the chart-topping rapper, mingled amid the artwork. A Sufi dancer in a crimson gown twirled between the tagged-up walls.The artist Shirin Neshat, center, in conversation with Jolie and the moderator Claude Grunitzky. “Art doesn’t come from intuition,” Neshat said. “It has to come from the life you have led.”Argenis ApolinarioAnd Jolie, the Oscar-winning actress, humanitarian and object of global fascination, was not the red-hot center of attention. Which is just how she wants it. “I like to see what other people make,” she said. “That’s part of my creativity.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘Rammellzee,’ edited by Maxwell Wolf and Jeff Mao

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      In the mid-1970s, a half-Black, half-Italian teenager from the projects in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens started hitting the A train with a spray can. At 18, he legally changed his name to Rammellzee, and since then no conversation about graffiti culture or the late-20th-century New York art scene has been complete without mentioning his influence.In RAMMELLZEE: Racing for Thunder (Rizzoli, $65), the first major monograph on the multi-hyphenate artist, who died in 2010, the co-editors Maxwell Wolf and Jeff Mao intersperse more than a half-century’s worth of art, photos and archives with an oral history as told by the fellow artists, friends and family who knew him best.Rammellzee spray-paints the Berlin Wall in 1983, on the occasion of his solo exhibition “Gothic Futurism.”via Silvia Menzel and Rizzoli“Untitled (Bands of Steel),” painted in acrylic and spray paint on carpet, circa 1985.via the Estate of Rammellzee and Rizzoli“In the Middle of Robbin the Bank the Dam Yard Bizzard Hits Us,” 1983.via D.E.F Collection, Paris and RizzoliAs a teenager Rammellzee conceived his theory of Gothic Futurism, which saw language as a “tool of oppression” and graffiti writers as heroes in a fight to liberate the world of letters. In the ’80s he began experimenting with new materials and a more formal studio practice, producing large-scale paintings, frescoes, sculpture, music, performance art and the elaborate costumes he wore to embody otherworldly, gender-fluid characters, like “Chaser the Eraser” and “Shun-U.”“Tower of Panzerism, The S.S. Speedway,” 1984.Matt Grubb / Red Bull Media HouseRammellzee as Chaser the Eraser, c. 2000.Mari Horiuchi, vía RizzoliRammellzee was an “enigma,” Wolf writes: “manic genius, style god,” and also “irascible overlord” and “to some, simply an incoherent madman.” A pioneer of hip-hop and freestyle, he played with idiosyncratic nasal and at times comic vocal styles that were widely mimicked in early rap and would inspire artists like the Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill. He had an on-and-off friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat, who helped produce his 1983 vinyl single “Beat Bop,” and he had a small part in the 1984 film “Stranger Than Paradise,” whose director, Jim Jarmusch, called him an overlooked genius.Rammellzee in his apartment in New York City’s TriBeCa neighborhood, c. 1991.Monica Fritz
      “He was not part of anybody’s school,” the artist Henry Chalfant says in the book. “Rammellzee literally invented his life and the compelling mystique around himself and his work. This is a quintessentially American thing.” More

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      Whimsical Parade of Banksy Animals Sends Fans on a Giddy Hunt

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      Each day for nine straight days, a new Banksy artwork appeared somewhere in London. For some, it became a citywide treasure hunt.The first Banksy piece to show up was a mountain goat, spotted by passers-by on a wall near the River Thames. The second work, a pair of elephants, appeared overnight on a house in southwest London. Then came some playful monkeys, a howling wolf, two hungry pelicans and a cat.For nine straight days, Banksy, the famed and elusive street artist, unveiled a menagerie of animal artworks around the city, a prolific outburst that thrilled Londoners.For Banksy fans, finding the works became a daily, citywide scavenger hunt.“It’s like an adventure,” said Daniel Lloyd-Morgan, an artist who sketches live street scenes. “It’s turned into a safari around London.”Every day since the first one appeared, Mr. Lloyd-Morgan checked social media to figure out the location of each new Banksy and pay it a visit. “This is like a happening,” he said. “So basically I put everything else on hold.”It was an unusually whimsical outpouring from Banksy, a British artist known for his socially and politically charged street art, which has appeared in New York City, the West Bank, Ukraine and other areas around the world. More recently, he sent an inflatable boat with dummy passengers to surf across a crowd at the Glastonbury Festival in England, a commentary on the plight of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea.But what message was Banksy trying to send with the animals scattered across London? That has spurred speculation, even as the works have delighted the residents of the neighborhoods they popped up in.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Manfred Kirchheimer, ‘Indispensable’ New York Filmmaker, Dies at 93

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      For decades, he meticulously crafted short films and documentaries in relative obscurity. Then, in his 80s, he enjoyed a burst of productivity and acclaim.Manfred Kirchheimer, a filmmaker who was drawn to stickball, jazz, subway graffiti, gargoyles on old buildings and the memories of aging immigrants, and who after decades of slowpoke perfectionism earned a reputation as a master of nonfiction cinema, died on July 16 at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 93.The cause was cancer, his son Gabe said.Mr. Kirchheimer often wrote, produced, directed and edited his movies as well as photographed them. He worked hard to get funding from nonprofit sources, and he earned a living as a freelance film editor and a film professor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan from the mid-1970s until the mid-2010s.His camera moved at the speed of people-watching: lingering for an extra moment to relish a certain scene, turning to something else in the bounty of street sights, then returning his gaze somewhere it had already been, hungry for a second helping.He found dignity and delight in what other New Yorkers overlooked or even disdained. Mayor Ed Koch, for instance, called subway graffiti blight, but Mr. Kirchheimer exulted in the subway exteriors of the late 1970s as traveling canvases. He made the subway the main character of his 1981 movie, “Stations of the Elevated,” with a soundtrack by Charles Mingus that suggested that graffiti could have the same rough, improvisational genius as his jazz.The subway cars that Mr. Kirchheimer filmed featured a portrait of a hitchhiking snowman; a verdant landscape overseen by a smiling, big-eyed sun; and cryptic messages in bubble letters — “HEAVEN IS LIFE,” “am nor disaster!” He followed the trains from Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, at the city’s northern edge, past South Bronx tenements whose stoops hosted playing children, all the way to the beaches of Coney Island.Mr. Kirchheimer exulted in the subway exteriors of the late 1970s as traveling canvases and made them the focus of his 1981 movie, “Stations of the Elevated.”Manfred Kirchheimer/Cinema ConservancyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York’s Secret Signatures

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      Across New York City, people have written their names in places that only a select few ever get to see.Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at hidden signatures in places you might not expect people to scribble their names. We’ll also get details on Senator Robert Menendez’s decision to resign in the wake of his conviction on corruption charges.James Barron/The New York TimesThis is not about the many things in New York that are hidden in plain sight. This is about things that are just plain hidden — little secrets that are understood only by those who know they are there.Specifically, signatures — the unseen John Hancocks of the people who made something or built something.For generations, the workers at the Steinway & Sons factory in Astoria, Queens, signed the pianos in places not even a virtuoso could find — until the managers said, No more.And construction workers have a long history of signing a beam that is put in place forever — a tradition that extends well beyond New York and usually includes people who designed or financed the building, or are the reason it is being built. Former President Barack Obama signed such a beam at the topping-out ceremony for his presidential center in Chicago last month. His signature won’t be visible in the ceiling of the room where the beam is going, which a spokeswoman described as “an intricately designed, angled affair.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beyond Outlaw: New Paths for Aging Taggers

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      At Lehmann Maupin, exhibitions of new work pushing the form of street art forward, from San Francisco’s Barry McGee and Osgemeos, the Brazilian artists he inspired.Street art is in a funny place. More than 50 years since its invention as the urgent, unruly markings of kids scrawling their names on walls and the flanks of subway cars, it has evolved into a worldwide language and commercial behemoth — from a position outside the mainstream to one in its center. Its progenitors, having reached late middle age, are still searching for ways to push the form forward, even if that way moves beyond its improvisatory and outlaw mode into something tidier and more well mannered.Two exhibitions of new work by the artists Osgemeos and Barry McGee at the Lehmann Maupin gallery in Manhattan illustrate divergent paths for the aging tagger. Neither represents a significant departure for either artist so much as retrenchments of their well-defined practices, honed for gallery consumption over the last 30 years. But familiarity can be instructive, a map for longevity over novelty. Their work suggests the street is more of a mind-set than a medium.Their presentations here are linked, but not by style, which could scarcely be more different. Osgemeos (Portuguese for “the twins”) — the Brazilian identical twin brothers Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo — are enamored with the nascent hip-hop culture of late 1970s New York City: style writing, break dancing and D.J.-ing, which the ’80s had floated down to South America. The brothers began making work as teenagers, bombing fat letters that chugged along like a rail car around their native São Paulo.Eventually they expanded into baroque murals featuring cartoony humanoid figures rendered in an obnoxiously lurid palette that looked more like a hallucinatory children’s television show than anything happening on the street. (Even now, it’s easy to imagine their characters launching into an extended reverie on words that start with the letter A, say, or listening intently as an adult patiently explains the concept of anxiety.)Osgemeos, “Cultivando os Sonhos (Cultivating Dreams),” 2023, mixed media on MDF Board.via Osgemeos and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and LondonOsgemeos, “A Vênus (The Venus),” 2023, mixed media on MDF board with sequinsvia Osgemeos and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and LondonMcGee, about eight years older at 58, is a product of San Francisco’s countercultural tendencies. He came to tagging as a reclamation of public space from the incursion of commercialism, and as an empathetic witness to those whom that commercialism dispossessed; his work is often punctuated by a slumped caricature with sagging eyes and defeated air.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More