Fred Brathwaite, more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and hip hop pioneer. He is considered one of the architects of the street art movement. Freddy emerged in New York's downtown underground creative scene in the late 1970s as a graffiti artist. He was the bridge between the burgeoning uptown rap scene and the downtown No Wave art scene. He was immortalized in 1981 when Debbie Harry rapped on the Blondie song "Rapture" that "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly." In the late 1980s, Freddy became the first host of the groundbreaking hip-hop music video show Yo! MTV Raps.
Style Wars is an American 1983 documentary film on hip hop culture, directed by Tony Silver and produced in collaboration with Henry Chalfant. The film has an emphasis on graffiti, although bboying and rapping are covered to a lesser extent. The film was originally aired on PBS television on January 18, 1984, and was subsequently shown in several film festivals to much acclaim, including the Vancouver Film Festival. It also won the Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.
Leonard Hilton McGurr, known as Futura, and formerly known as Futura 2000, is an American graffiti artist.
Richard "Richie" Mirando, known as Seen UA is an American graffiti artist. He is one of the best known graffiti artists in the world and has been referred to as the Godfather of Graffiti.
Wild Style is a 1983 American hip hop film directed and produced by Charlie Ahearn. Regarded as the first hip hop motion picture, it includes appearances by seminal figures such as Fab Five Freddy, Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, The Rock Steady Crew, The Cold Crush Brothers, Queen Lisa Lee of Zulu Nation, Grandmaster Flash and ZEPHYR.
ZEPHYR, born Andrew Witten, is a graffiti artist, lecturer and author from New York City. He began writing graffiti in 1975 using the name "Zephyr" in 1977. He is considered a graffiti "elder", who along with Futura 2000, Blade, PHASE 2, CASH, Lady Pink and TAKI 183 invented styles and standards which are still in use.
Rammellzee was a visual artist, gothic futurist "graffiti writer", painter, performance artist, art theoretician, sculptor and a hip hop musician from New York City, who has been cited as "instrumental in introducing elements of the avant-garde into hip-hop culture". Since 2021, Rammellzee's work is exclusively represented by Jeffrey Deitch.
George Lee Quiñones is a Puerto Rican artist and actor. Quiñones rose to prominence by creating massive New York City subway car graffiti that carried his moniker "LEE". His style is rooted in popular culture and often with political messages.
Lady Pink, born Sandra Fabara (1964), is an Ecuadorian-American graffiti and mural artist.
Martha Cooper is an American photojournalist. She worked as a staff photographer for the New York Post during the 1970s. She is best known for documenting the New York City graffiti scene of the 1970s and 1980s.
TRACY 168 is an American graffiti artist. He pioneered the art form known as Wildstyle. Tracy 168 came to be known as one of the most influential graffiti and street artists of all time, as variations of Wild Style writing spread around the world. He is acknowledged to have been a seminal figure in the development of street art. Books about 1970s graffiti feature his car-long paintings with their characteristic kinetic script embellished with flames, arrows as well as cartoon characters and the "Tracy face," a grinning shaggy-haired visage in wrap-around shades.
Dean Stockton, better known by his alias D*Face, is an English multimedia street artist who uses spray paint, stickers, posters, and stencils.
Charlie Ahearn is an American film maker living in New York City. Although predominantly involved in film and video art production, he is also known for his work as an author, freelance writer, member of Colab, and radio host. He is married to the painter Jane Dickson and is the twin brother to the sculptor John Ahearn.
Carlos Rodriguez is a New York-based artist born in 1965 in Spanish Harlem, New York City. He was best known as the subway graffiti writer Mare 139, and has since adapted the graffiti lettering styles to metal sculpture in the fine art context, and is recognized as a media artist for his creation of graffiti-art-related websites.
George “Crime79” Ibañez is a famous New York City-based graffiti artist. He was introduced to graffiti art while attending Franklin K. Lane High School and began painting subways at age 13 in the East New York section of Brooklyn. While continuing with his subway art, Ibañez was named Class Artist and received the Art Students League of New York Gold Medal. He then studied at the School of Visual Arts.
Graffiti in New York City has had a substantial local, national, and international influence. Originating in Philadelphia and spreading to the New York City Subway and beyond, graffiti is among the most common forms of vandalism committed today.
Brim Fuentes, is the founding member of graffiti crew TATS CRU, and was born in the South Bronx, New York City. Brim was fortunate enough to start writing graffiti in one of the most important periods of graffiti history. He began bombing and hitting New York City Subway trains, in the late 1970s, all the way through to the mid-1980s. After the trains were cleaned in 1989 he and the rest of TATS CRU took to the streets and began bombing and creating street art all over the city.
Sacha Jenkins is an American television producer, filmmaker, writer, musician, artist, curator, and chronicler of hip-hop, graffiti, punk, and metal cultures. While still in his teens, Jenkins published Graphic Scenes & X-Plicit Language, one of the earliest ‘zines solely dedicated to “graffiti” art. In 1994, Jenkins co-founded ego trip magazine. In 2007, he created the competition reality program “ego trip's The (White) Rapper Show," which was carried by VH1. Currently, Jenkins is the creative director of Mass Appeal magazine.
United Graffiti Artists was an early American graffiti artists collective, founded in 1972 by Hugo Martinez in New York City. UGA was the first organized group of writers, and the first to promote graffiti as a high art. Martinez, then a student activist at City College of New York, organized a group of teenagers who had been tagging the subways into a loose collective, formalizing their work and paving the way for commercialization. In September 1973, UGA organized the first ever gallery show of graffiti at the Razor Gallery in SoHo.
Torrick Ablack, also known as Toxic, is an American artist who was part of the graffiti movement of the early 1980s in New York City. He transitioned from street art to exhibiting his paintings in galleries and museums internationally.
