Читать книгу American Graffiti - Margo Thompson - Страница 16

Four writers began to establish themselves as graffiti artists while still active in the train yards by painting whole-car masterpieces that appealed to a public beyond their writing peers or decisively transcended the inherent design limitations of the tag. DONDI, FUTURA 2000, ZEPHYR, and LEE crossed paths at the graffiti collectives Soul Artists and Graffiti 1980, and in the production of a film about graffiti, Wild Style, directed by filmmaker and rap aficionado Charlie Ahearn. FUTURA 2000, who like DONDI was regarded as a master writer, helped to organise writers for commercial commissions, through Soul Artists, and working on canvas, in the Graffiti 1980 studio that will be discussed later in this chapter. ZEPHYR was active in Soul Artists and was the instigator for Graffiti 1980, and with DONDI took Ahearn to paint a train as part of his pre-production research for Wild Style. While DONDI, FUTURA, and ZEPHYR made the connections in 1980 that would eventually take graffiti into commercial galleries, LEE had already shown his paintings in Europe in 1979, with FAB FIVE FREDDY. His murals on handball courts in Lower Manhattan led an Italian art collector to contact him with the offer of an exhibition at a gallery in Rome. He and FREDDY would both appear in Wild Style and also in another film about art on the margins of the Manhattan market, New York Beat (released in 2000 as Downtown 81), starring Jean-Michel Basquiat.