LADY PINK

Sandra Fabara, who has written as Lady Pink since 1979, was born in Ecuador in 1964 and raised in Queens, New York. She began writing at fifteen and painted New York City subway trains from 1979 to 1985, becoming one of the very few women to achieve sustained prominence within the intensely male-dominated graffiti culture of the period. She studied at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan and began exhibiting paintings while still a student. In 1982 she starred in Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style, released in 1983, a landmark film of early hip-hop culture that brought her work and persona to an international audience.

Her practice developed from subway writing into painting and muralism without abandoning the visual language of the city. Lady Pink's work is figurative, vividly coloured and frequently political, combining women at monumental scale, surreal and architectural cityscapes, trains, lettering and imagery concerned with power, gender and public space. Her position as a young woman painting alongside male writers became inseparable from the history of her work: she expanded both the imagery and the authorship that graffiti could accommodate, and has since been widely known as the First Lady of Graffiti.

Lady Pink was part of the generation that carried graffiti from trains and walls into galleries and museums. Her earliest canvases were included in New York/New Wave at P.S.1 in 1981. She participated in Post Graffiti at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1983 and held her first solo exhibition, Femmes Fatales, at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia in 1984. Major later institutional presentations have included Graffiti at the Brooklyn Museum in 2006 and Art in the Streets at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2011. In 2015 the Queens Museum presented Respectfully Yours, a site-specific project bringing together the painter, muralist and graffiti writer within her practice.

Her institutional presence has continued into the present. In 2025 her work was included in Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection at the Museum of the City of New York, and MoMA PS1 commissioned Foundations for its inaugural annual Plaza Mural, installed at the museum's main entrance from June 2025 to May 2026. The mural brought together recurring elements of her practice — surreal masonry, the New York skyline and the 7 train — while paying tribute to 5Pointz and to New York's graffiti history.

With her husband, the writer SMITH, Lady Pink has worked for decades on murals and public projects, and the two form one of the very few professional mural teams to have come out of the graffiti subculture. Education is central to her later career: she has run mural workshops for young people for more than twenty years, supported by an annual grant from the Martin Wong Foundation, and lectures at universities internationally.

Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Walker Art Center, Tate and the Groninger Museum.

ARTIST CV

Born 1964, Ambato, Ecuador

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Education and Training

1985 Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA

1982 High School of Art and Design, New York, NY, USA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2025 Lady Pink: Miss Subway NYC, D’Stassi Art, London, United Kingdom

2024 She’s an Anomaly, Arena Studio d’Arte, Verona, Italy

2024 GraffitiandCo, Paris, France

2020 Figure, Foxy Production, New York, NY, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2022 Accrochage saisonnier, Ghost Galerie, Paris, France

2022 Legends: Lady Pink et Speedy Graphito, Art Five Gallery, Marseille, France

2022 New York Street Style: création des années 80, Ghost Galerie, Paris, France

2021 Ghost DNA, Ghost Galerie, Paris, France

2021 New York in the 80s: Selections from the Barry Blinderman Collection, Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL, USA

2020 Speedy Graphito and Lady Pink, Art Five Galerie, Marseille, France

2017 Purple Haze, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM, USA

2012 Purple: Younity, Causey Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY, USA

2011 Selections: Robert Morris, Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer and Lady Pink, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, Germany

1998 Inner City, La Casa d’Arte, Milan, Italy

1997 Bullet Space, New York, NY, USA

1996 Do You See What I See, Thread Waxing Space, New York, NY, USA

1996 Tribu Universal, Thoughtforms Underground, New York, NY, USA

1996 Livestock Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1995 Just Above Ground / Off the Wall, AC-BAW Center for the Arts, Mount Vernon, NY, USA

1994 DYAD, 57 Grand Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA

1994 Multiple Flavors, SpaceTime Light Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1994 Urban Expressionism, Hudson Guild Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1994 Sixth Congress Gallery, Tucson, AZ, USA

1993 Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1992 Graffiti III, Colleen Greco Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1992 Malcolm X: The Portrait of a Legacy, Aaron Davis Hall, City College, New York, NY, USA

1992 Self Portraits, Klarfeld Perry Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1983 Post-Graffiti, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, NY, USA

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2025 Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection, Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY, USA

2021 Lady Pink: Graffiti Herstory, Museum of Graffiti, Miami, FL, USA (solo)

2020 Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA

2019 Beyond the Streets, New York, NY, USA

2018 City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the 1970s and 1980s, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, USA

2018 Readymades Belong to Everyone, Swiss Institute, New York, NY, USA

2016 Code Mixing: From Concrete to Canvas, MACLA / Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, San José, CA, USA

2016 The Printed Room — Works Off Paper, SALTS, Birsfelden, Switzerland

2015 Respectfully Yours, Lady Pink, Queens Museum, New York, NY, USA (solo)

2014 City as Canvas, Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY, USA

2011 Art in the Streets, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2009 Urban Archives: That Was Then, This Is Now, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY, USA

2007 Graffiti Art and Fashion, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ, USA

2004 East Village USA, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY, USA

1999 New York Views, Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY, USA

1999 Quik and Company, Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands

1999 Urban Mythologies, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY, USA

1998 The Writing on the Wall, Herning Kunstmuseum, Herning, Denmark

1993 Still Graffiti, De Librije, Zwolle, Netherlands

1992 New York Graffiti Art: Coming from the Subway, Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands

1990 Lady Pink, Queens Museum, New York, NY, USA (solo)

1984 Femmes Fatales, Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA (solo)

1981 New York/New Wave, P.S.1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Long Island City, NY, USA

1980 GAS: Graffiti Art Success for America, Fashion Moda, New York, NY, USA

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2025 Foundations, MoMA PS1 Plaza Mural, New York, NY, USA

2024 Love Letters to the City, Façade commission, Urban Nation Museum, Berlin, Germany

2000 Mural, La Sirena, Astoria, New York, NY, USA

1999 Welcome, Mural, Astoria, New York, NY, USA

1999 Mural, Lindenwood Diner, Queens, New York, NY, USA

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA

Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA