![]() Twenty years later I started seeing this image on tattoos and now thousands of men in prison have it. Señor Suerte was my tag early on, in 1969. Where to see his work on the streets today Here it’s about being Latino, and you tag your neighborhood because you’re proud of it, to protect it. There they’ll tag all over the city it’s about getting their name up and not about their culture. ![]() The difference between New York and Los Angeles graffiti It taught me a lot about doing billboards and signs: The logos have to be read within three seconds. I used to design logos for movies - “The Warriors,” “Turk 182.” And I did master inking for “The Empire Strikes Back,” the Muppet movies, James Bond. I’ve turned down Adidas, Pony and Nike shoes because they’re not my style. I took the strength of cholo and the spirit of the brush. I was also inspired by Asian calligraphy. Everybody hated it, and I found strength and beauty in it. So I took the cholo graffiti that had been in the streets since the 1940s. I was raised during the civil rights movement, so it was important to me to find my American identity in being Chicano, in being Mexican American, and graffiti did that for me. That’s why in the ‘40s gang members used it to define their neighborhoods - they’d make a “roll call” or list of names to mark their territory. It’s a prestigious typeface used in birth certificates, the Declaration of Independence and newspaper logos like the L.A. It goes back to the first printing press, the Gutenberg, where the Germans used it to represent the government. The typeface is Old English, some people call it Gothic. So I went back to the old tradition of graffiti writers from the ‘40s who used a brush. It had low pressure, bad pigment and the paint would run down my elbows. When I started in the 1970s, there was only one can and only one tip - Krylon. For the Geffen, he has made a new roll-call painting that will hang along with earlier works. ![]() In short, they all started out at a time when it was pretty much inconceivable that they would ever be interviewed about their careers as street artists.Ĭhaz Bojórquez found art in the c holo-style graffiti associated with Latino gangs and now sounds a bit like a scholar of gang history. They’ve seen their own art and their colleagues’ migrate into fine art galleries on the one hand and onto clothing, advertising and entertainment on the other. They have all witnessed their rebellious, adolescent gestures become a popular activity - and big business. in the 1980s.Īt 43, Risk represents another generation, but these artists share something in common. Risk helped bring Wild Style, with its bubbly forms and interlocking letters, from New York to L.A. Craig Stecyk, 60, helped shape the graffiti-fueled surf-skate aesthetic of Venice and Santa Monica in the 1970s. Now Bojórquez, 62, calls himself the “the oldest consistently working graffiti artist in the world.”īojórquez is one of three street art pioneers, interviewed here, who illustrates the range of the field. Years later his earliest painting on canvas, in the form of a “roll call” or list of names, was acquired by the Smithsonian. Looking at Los Angeles, this means seeing emerging street art stars such as Retna in relation to Chaz Bojórquez, who in the late 1960s was the first to treat cholo lettering associated with Latino gangs as an art form. tagging in the ‘70s and culminating with Banksy setting an auction record in 2007 of more than $1.8 million for a single painting. But now, he says, “it’s an established art movement.” And, speaking like an established art historian, Rose divides the movement into three phases, starting with New York and L.A. “Just five years ago, street art was an underground thing, very renegade,” says one of the show’s curators, Aaron Rose. In part the show tells the story of street art flooding mainstream culture and, despite doubts from some of the international art elite, entering the museum sphere. And they are getting credit for their life’s work in MOCA’s sweeping “Art in the Streets” exhibition, which opens April 17 at the Geffen Contemporary. in the 1970s and ‘80s are still going strong today, if not exactly risking prison. And a night in jail is rougher when you’re 55 than at 25.īut several artists who were pioneers of graffiti art in L.A. Young kids are jockeying to take your place, or your spot to paint, anyway. It’s not easy being an aging street artist.
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