“WTC 50” View of NYC Skyline from a Jersey City scrapyard, late 1980s. Photography by Steven Siegel

Now, no graffiti artist during the subway era referred to their way as graffiti, a media term and a slur, yet it is still the best term to describe the multi-cultured avant-garde movement that began with Taki 183’s straightforward autographs of the late 1960s and ended with Jon One’s wild abstractions in the late 1980s, when the last illegally-painted 1 train was taken out of commission. And all throughout, every scrawled word or scribbled face spoke a code, puzzling my curiosity like ancient hieroglyphs. Indeed it was a strict orthodoxy of form, and yet allowing for a complete freedom of innovation for the proven initiate, as some amorphous council of ascended “kings” maintained ever-evolving standards. 

A procession of fresh masterpieces rumbled past, convoluted multicolored letters twisting back on themselves, taking my breath away like no other form of Beauty. In time I grew to understand their mysteries the way a hungry man understands a sandwich. Here it should be stated as fact that neither Basquiat nor Haring were ever graffiti artists as such, and neither was the Shadow Man, yet no conversation about these artists would be complete without first understanding their complex relationship to this craft. And if so-called graffiti was to my mind the biggest art breakthrough of the age, to say another kind of artist was every bit as relevant is no mean praise.

Rooftops in Chinatown Manhattan, 2019

Photograph by Howie Mapson

On this new cultural wave of the early 1980s rode several Art world mavericks, who would storm the citadel of galleries and museums by first laying siege to the war-scarred city streets. We first saw Keith’s chalk drawings on the blank subway posters, the soft curves of a Tex Avery or Disney illustration but in situ, in our hardscrabble subterranean domain of mass transit, these speciously innocent characters took on a subversive attitude. We all regularly appropriated comic book characters as alter egos beside our subway paintings, yet Haring had created an animated iconography of his very own, and was thus first embraced by the graffiti underground as a true original before rising to prominence as an bona fide Art star.

Basquiat was a native New Yorker, a Brooklynite, and he learned to write on walls side by side with actual taggers of repute. He did everything in his own variety of cool, and his inscrutable slogans and unadorned manner of penmanship were at odds with formal graffiti, almost to the point of constituting an anti-graffiti. And yet his modus operandi, even down to his raw anti-aesthetic stance, endeared him to the ranks of graffiti artists from the “beyond” category, restless young turks themselves who sought to break away from the stylistic trends that had already become codified as an -ism. Basquiat was accepted by members of the elite TDS crew and particularly Rammellzee’s Iconoclast Panzerist inner-circle: A1, Arbitrator Koor and Toxic. So Basquiat would ascend to be heralded by the Art establishment despite his early flirtation with illegal Art. So Martin Wong, Kenny Scharf , David Wojnarowicz and a few others found success while simultaneously earning credibility for street authenticity, as did the Shadow Man, Richard Hambleton.