Iconic East Village painter Martin Wong left behind a legacy not just through his work, but also with an eclectic collection of unique art and objects amassed during his lifetime. Through close friendships with significant members of New York’s graffiti scene during the 1970s and ’80s — including LEE (Lee Quiñones), DAZE (Chris Ellis), and SHARP (Aaron Goodstone) — Wong put together an impressive collection of paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and rare “black book” sketchbooks from the period, all of which he donated to the Museum of the City of New York in 1994, five years before he died of AIDS. A selection of those items are now the subject of the exhibition “City as Canvas: Graffiti Art From the Martin Wong Collection,” curated by Sean Corcoran and open through August 24.
The show explores New York City’s street art scene through some 150 works from the 300-piece collection — the largest of its kind held by a public entity — along with historic photographs of murals and spray painted subway cars, and an assortment ephemeral objects. What sets “City as Canvas” apart from other recent street art blockbusters like MOCA L.A.’s “Art in the Streets” are the smaller, personal works that form the backbone of Wong’s collection, providing an in-depth look at the progression of New York City’s influential street style.
“City as Canvas” comes at a significant crossroads for New York’s current street art scene. In November, the long-time graffiti refuge 5Pointz— a legal oasis for writers — was controversially whitewashed following a landmarking initiative driven by artists to prevent destruction of the building. With few legal places for large-scale works to be made, the future of the city’s street art scene is once again in the hands of its artists. “City as Canvas” provides an appropriate reminder of the far-reaching and continued significance of the scene.
ARTINFO’s Alanna Martinez spoke with curator Sean Corcoran about the exhibition’s planning, Martin Wong’s legacy, and the future of New York street art. Vanessa Yurkevich also visited the show and caught up with featured artists LADY PINK and FUTURA 2000.
Read our interview with Sean Corcoran below; watch our video on “City as Canvas” by clicking the player at the top of this page.
How did this exhibition come together? What inspired it?
The collection was donated in 1994, and it had been used in a few other small projects over the years. When I started at the museum in 2007, part of my responsibilities included the prints and drawings section, and the black books were part of that collection. When I came across the black books I was pretty inspired by what I saw. That led me to do a lot more research on what was in the Martin Wong Collection. Basically, for the past five years or so, I’ve been doing research on the collection, learning who the artists are, and doing all the background necessary to be able to put something together in a way that is true to what Martin was collecting and what the overall history of the movement is — because it is its own art genre.
It sounds like the black books really kicked things off for you.
That was really the hook for me. Looking through them, and seeing the raw creativity — that was really where ideas were formed and shared among the graffiti writers.
What else about the collection makes it so unique?
The blacks books are — in a public collection — very unique. Typically, those are the kinds of things that writers keep; they don’t sell them, and they don’t really appear in public collections often because they are very personal things. That component of the collection is very rare. But what I think really makes the collection so special was the person who put it together, a painter named Martin Wong, and his relationship to the writers. He put the collection together in a very personal way; he had very personal connections to most of the material in the collection.
A particular example is Lee Quiñones’s “Howard the Duck” painting. Martin was a very close friend with Lee, and that painting is a reproduction of a painting that Lee did on a handball court on the Lower East Side. It was near where Martin lived. He was so enthralled with it and thought that the city should preserve it forever, but Lee knew that was never going to happen so he agreed to make this painting specifically for Martin.
What other kinds of works are included in the show?
It’s worth noting that most of the works in the collection were consciously created as art — not everything, but almost everything was. They were made to be shown in people’s homes, or sold through galleries. The black books are an exception, and there are a few things that are found objects. But generally, it is mostly canvasses or specially created objects to be considered artwork. For instance, there are elaborate wooden sculptures made by the artist Delta II that look like totems and there’s a very abstract wooden sculpture made by SHARP. Some pieces are made on metal scraps, but the vast majority is pretty traditional work on canvas.
Who was Martin Wong and how did he come to acquire many of the pieces in the collection?
Martin was a born in San Francisco, and went to Humboldt State University where he studied ceramics. He wasn’t trained as a painter but he wanted to be one, so he moved to New York, because that’s where, at the time, you would move to have a career. He arrived in New York in 1978 and showed his first paintings not too long after at ABC No Rio. He lived on the Lower East Side and quickly become part of the community, and the city itself became his subject. He painted the tenements and the people he saw in the neighborhood, and to make his living he worked at places like Pearl Paint.
Through showing his work at the local East Village galleries, being on the scene, and working at Pearl Paint, he met a lot of graffiti artists because they were also showing in galleries and coming into the art store to buy supplies. He developed relationships with many of them, and eventually he began trading work. Sometimes he would trade his own paintings to an artist for their work. Occasionally he would buy, sometimes through galleries or sometimes directly from the artist. But with a handful of them, he became very close friends. They would come over and talk about painting for hours on end with him, or they would watch him paint, and it became a mutual friendship where they could talk about painting or talk about their motivations with each other. To a certain extent he became mentors to them, or maybe they’d share advice about what it was like to be part of the gallery.
Though Martin is known foremost as an artist, it’s interesting that he’s developed an “unanticipated” legacy as a collector. The Danh Vo show at the Guggenheim in 2012 featured his collection of Americana, and now this show focuses on his collection of street art.
That’s one thing I haven’t mentioned so far: Wong was a born collector. He had that “collecting gene.” What you had in the Danh Vo show was mostly tchotchke Americana kinds of things, but Martin also had a huge lunch box collection and an early rock poster collection. It was just part of who he was, a natural born collector.
Obviously a lot has changed over the years for graffiti, from style and materials to trends in tagging and imagery. Can you tell me what stands out to you looking at the work in Martin’s collection, compared to what is going on in the scene today?
Martin was very open-minded and he was really interested in what was made in the ’70s and the ’80s. He was interested in the progression of the work and he thought of it in a certain art historical context: how the form developed and changed. He collected some very early work by a graffiti writer named Wicked Gary — a writer from the early ’70s — who gathered up all the signatures from the earliest writers in New York in this tag collection of hand-style signatures, compiled from 1970 to 1973. Martin was interested in the beginnings of the modern graffiti writing movement, but he was also interested in the figurative paintings that DAZE was making that you see in a work like “Amazon Hotel.” Between “Wicked Gary’s Tag Collection” and “Amazon Hotel” you’ll see the differences in style and time period, and the wide range of interest Wong had.
As for how that compares to what you see today, I think in today’s scene we think of a lot of what’s happening as “street art,” and the difference is there are a lot of people who have gone to graduate school and have their MFAs, or they’re trained artists that are making work on the street with a very clear goal of being working artists. The earlier generations had different motivations, and many of them were certainly not classically trained artists. So there are possibly different origins and purposes at play at this point.
The show comes at an important moment for New York street art, with the recent loss of Long Island City’s 5Pointz. Do you have a prediction for what the future of graffiti and street art in the city might be like?
It’s coincidence. We were working on the show long before it happened, but New York City is constantly changing. In 1989, when the MTA declared the subways “graffiti free,” public art continued on. With the closing of 5Pointz it might be a similar kind of crisis to some artists, but I believe it’ll continue on in some form that hasn’t necessarily appeared yet. There are places that already exist like the Bushwick Collective, where more people are painting regularly, so there are some outlets that are still here, and I’m sure something else will come along as well.
