“The Art Was My Escape”: Lee Quiñones, Subway Graffiti Pioneer, Gets the Mega-Monograph Treatment

Lee Quiñones always wanted to be an artist. Growing up in the Alfred E. Smith projects in New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1960s and early 1970s, he was surrounded by inspiring art—bold, colorful graffiti emblazoned on walls, storefronts, and subway cars—but he never saw anyone creating it. “This particular inscribing…was done in secret, covertly,” Quiñones says. Such stealth was necessary, since spray-painting public property was not only seen as a misdemeanor but as a sign of the municipal apocalypse. In a tumultuous era when New York City nearly declared bankruptcy, graffiti was frequently scapegoated as a social ill that was destroying the city.

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Quiñones knew better. He saw a coded conversation among young people, most of them Black and brown, expressing their identity and what he calls “an urgency for a sense of our belonging.” Quiñones wanted to be a part of the dialogue. He found his voice when, at age 13, a local graffiti artist named Flea led him into the subway tunnels, where artists were creating vibrant, mobile murals on the city’s transit system. “Being introduced to that scene, and the movement in the trains, was a sort of freedom,” Quiñones says. “It was really, truly the Underground Railroad for me.”

What a ride it’s been. A gorgeous new artistic monograph has just been published celebrating the pioneering 63-year-old Puerto Rico–born artist’s five-decade career. Titled Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond and edited by the journalist, writer, and entrepreneur Tamara Warren—who is also Lee’s wife—the book features essays and contributions from art world luminaries Franklin Sirmans (director of the Pérez Art Museum in Miami) and Isolde Brielmaier (deputy director of the New Museum in New York City); tributes from artistic colleagues including FUTURA, Debbie Harry, Jenny Holzer, William Cordova, Bisa Butler, Barry McGee, and Odili Donald Odita; and period photos by a roster of 1970s and 80s NYC scenesters including Charlie Ahearn, Martha Cooper, Sue Kwon, Edo Bertoglio, and Henry Chalfant.

But mainly, the book documents Lee’s work. Starting in the mid-70s, Quiñones produced scores of car-length and train-length rolling paintings. He developed his own signature style and text. Like the Pop artists, he appropriated characters, phrases, and symbology from comics, films, and consumer messaging. And he added commentary on contemporary social and civil rights movements. “The struggles that I witnessed and experienced personally was the friction around race,” Quiñones says. “The art was my escape. And it was also my voice, to voice about those issues in a way that I could not in society.”

Quiñones took it as his mission to disseminate this work as broadly as possible. “The trains were the vessel, literally, to get my work across town—from the northeast Bronx to the southeastern parts of Brooklyn, blighted areas,” he says. And he found, in the flourishing discord of that era, a catalyzing petri dish. “You had punk music, alternative rock, alternative films, and poetry. You had writing on the walls turning into mural-making. None of that stuff was scripted. It was just a moment, a flash moment,” he says.

Since his work was transgressive and transitory (the subway authority worked in Sisyphean frenzy to clean painted trains), Quiñones decided to make a bold move. In 1978, he brought his murals above ground, painting one on a stationary object: a handball wall. This shift helped usher in the first gallery shows dedicated to this emerging generation of artists, including a show with Fred Brathwaite (a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy) in Italy in 1979; a project with Brathwaite and Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York in 1980; his inclusion in the famed “Times Square Show” in 1980 and in “New York/New Wave” at PS.1 in 1981; a solo show at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 1982; and his inclusion at the prestigious Documenta international art fair that same year.

“It had no place to go, because it had already been underneath,” Quiñones says of his art. “It was subterranean in the first place. So it needed to go up.” Up it went. Lee, along with Brathwaite and Basquiat, painted murals for the new wave band Blondie’s 1979 video “The Hardest Part.” Lee painted the backdrops for—and appeared in—Blondie’s “Rapture” video in 1981. And he starred in Wild Style (1983), the foundational hip-hop/graffiti film. “Lee was part of the [Fabulous] 5 graffiti group. He was very cute, and his work [was] beautiful,” says Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie. “He has an attractive magnetism, personally, which reflects and corresponds with his paintings.”

Quiñones has never stopped producing. His paintings and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York. Among dozens of solo and group shows in recent decades, he was featured in the 2004 “East Village USA” exhibit at the New Museum, and the 2020 “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation” show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He’s created commissions and collaborations for Levi’s, The Boys Club of New York, Adidas, the Cleveland Board of Education, the Geffen Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Hotel Indigo, and Supreme. In fact, while we talked, he was completing work for a solo show that just opened at the Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.

He continues to mentor up-and-coming artists and advocate for the artistic rights of young people, because he believes in the power of giving voice to the underrepresented. “A long time ago, two cops said to me, ‘Lee, you’re dangerous because you’re an influence,’” he says. “Guys, we were painting. Put that into perspective. 50,000 young souls were painting. It is unheard of in any society that—myself included—people took to painting like that to serve as a calling. And no one said in school, ‘Only this is what you should do to break into the art world.’ It was all happening in a very unique and organic way. And I’m happy to still be here. I’m happy to still have that voice.”