Quiñones on the
set of the “Rapture”music video. Picture: Charlie Ahearn In 1980, Lee Quiñones was twenty years old and had currently become, to anybody who rode the train, a home name. On 4, 5, J, M, and R trains, LEE was graffitied across entire cars in giant blocks of text, the letters in some cases broke or dropped and molded into hardly identifiable shapes. Quiñones typically took motivation from cartoons and comic books, painting dragons or, a lot of notoriously, Howard the Duck. He and his art collective, the Fabulous Five, utilized graffiti as a sort of dialogue with the city, parts of which thought their work was, as Mayor Ed Koch put it, “damaging our way of life.” WHAT IS GRAFFITI ART? they composed on one vehicle. HAVE A LOOK FOR YOURSELF.
City management did not react in kind. “If I had my method, I would not put in pets but wolves,” Koch stated in 1980 when asked about how the city would punish graffiti artists. A year later on, his administration in fact did construct high barbed-wire fences and stationed German shepherds around a Queens train backyard. Then the MTA launched a pilot program that was referred to as the “Great White Fleet,” painting approximately a dozen 7 trains completely white, obviously in hopes that it would dissuade vandalism. “Can you believe that?” Quiñones states. “They really produced a canvas.” (The program was immediately ceased.)
My Lost Art World
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