Lee Quinones

Lee Quiñones was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on 24 July 1960 and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He began writing in the mid-1970s and, by the end of the decade, had done something no one else had: he painted entire subway cars single-handed, more than a hundred and twenty of them, and then moved to the handball courts of the Lower East Side, painting murals across full walls in public view rather than in the yards at night. Those walls — Howard the Duck in 1978, Land of Demons in 1979, The Lion's Den — turned graffiti from a signature into a public art form.

He was a founding member of the Fabulous Five, and in 1979 showed with them at Galleria La Medusa in Rome, one of the first exhibitions of New York subway painting anywhere. The following year he was in the Times Square Show and at Fashion Moda; in 1981 he appeared in New York/New Wave at P.S.1, and he starred in Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style, filmed in 1982 and released in 1983, for which he also painted the sets. He was in Documenta 7 in 1982, at twenty-two.

The paintings themselves resist the label they arrived with. Quiñones paints in oil and enamel with a figurative, atmospheric touch — cityscapes, portraits, cars, interiors, cropped and lit like film stills — and the handling owes as much to American realism as to aerosol. Where the subway work was declarative, the studio work is quiet and often melancholy, concerned with memory, class and the texture of New York rather than with the assertion of a name.

He has shown at Fun Gallery, Barbara Gladstone, Lisson Gallery, Barbara Farber, Charlie James Gallery and James Fuentes, and held a solo exhibition at P.S.1 in 2007 and at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati in 1983. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Gropius Bau, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Ludwig Forum, the Groninger Museum and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

His paintings are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Groninger Museum, the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst and the Blanton Museum of Art. He was honoured by the Brooklyn Borough President in 2005 and 2006, and by El Museo del Barrio in 2020.

SELECTED CV

Born 24 July 1960, Ponce, Puerto Rico

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2019 If These Walls Could Talk, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2019 Language Barriers, James Fuentes, New York, NY, USA

2015 Lee Quiñones, Nicole Klagsbrun, New York, NY, USA

2011 Taking the Fifth, Salon Bob, New York, NY, USA

2009 Truth and Consequences, Il Trifoglio Nero, Genoa, Italy

2006 Prelude, Galería Candela, San Juan, Puerto Rico

2005 A Day in the Life, Buck15, Miami, FL, USA

2003 Space & Time, Rome Arts, New York, NY, USA

2001 Ghetto Samurai, Salon Bob, New York, NY, USA

2001 Drawings, Then and Than, Rome Arts Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2001 Casual Getover, Lot 61, New York, NY, USA

1999 Nuevo, Espace Romero, Paris, France

1996 Windows, Livestock Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1994 Straight Forward, Urban Classics Ltd, New York, NY, USA

1985 New Horizons, Riverside Studios, London, United Kingdom

1984 Rapid Enamellist, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1984 Rudolf Zwirner Gallery, Cologne, Germany

1983 Barbara Farber Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Selected Group Exhibitions

2018 Shoot the Pump, Bullet Space, New York, NY, USA

2018 Beyond the Streets, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2015 Unrealism, Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch, Miami, FL, USA

2011 Nose Job, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY, USA

2011 Three Kings, Subliminal Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2009 Whole in the Wall, Galerie Helenbeck, New York, NY, USA

2006 Downtown 81, Festival d'Automne, Paris, France

2005 Style & Design from A–Z, Latin Collector Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2004 New Works: Lee Quiñones and Pedro Gomez, Rome Arts, New York, NY, USA

2003 Bright Lights Big City, David Zwirner, New York, NY, USA

1996 Futura, Lee, Stash, Russ, Surr Gallery, New York, NY, USA

1995 25 Contemporary Artists from New York, Yuki-Sun International, Nagoya, Japan

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2021 The Cool and the Cold: Painting from the USA and the USSR 1960–1990, Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany

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

2019 Elements of Style: New York City Street Culture in the 1980s, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea

2019 Henry Chalfant: Art vs Transit, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY, USA

2018 The Zeitgeist, Maier Museum of Art, Lynchburg, VA, USA

2017 Cross the Streets, MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Rome, Italy

2016 Glamourous Graffiti, Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, NY, USA

2014 The Other Americans, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany

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

2011 Looking at Music 3.0, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

2011 Hyperreal: Art in America around 1970, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany

2011 Next Wave Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, NY, USA

2010 Sisley Art Project, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

2009 Martin Wong's Downtown Crossings, Asian/Pacific/American Institute, New York University, New York, NY, USA

2007 Lee Quiñones (solo), P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, USA

2004 East Village USA, New Museum, New York, NY, USA

2000 Hip-Hop: Roots, Rhymes & Rage, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA

1994 Aerosoul, The Paterson Museum, Paterson, NJ, USA

Biennials, Triennials and Art Fairs

2018 Open Spaces Biennial, Kansas City, MO, USA

2011 El Museo's Biennial: The (S) Files, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA

1982 Documenta 7, Kassel, Germany

Awards, Honours and Residencies

2020 Padrino, Three Kings Day Parade, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA

2019 Artist Honoree, Henry Street Settlement, New York, NY, USA

2011 Artist Honoree, Groundswell Community Mural Project, New York, NY, USA

2008 Jam Master Jay Award for the Arts, New York, NY, USA

2006 Great Brooklynite, Office of the Brooklyn Borough President, New York, NY, USA

2005 Lee Quiñones Day, Proclaimed by the Brooklyn and Manhattan Borough Presidents, New York, NY, USA

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2018 Supreme Spring Collection

2016 Coney Island Art Walls, New York, NY, USA

2015 Hotel Indigo Lower East Side, New York, NY, USA

2012 Lucky Guy, Broadway, New York, NY, USA

2011 Birds of a Feather, The Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA

2007 Voices Carry, Cleveland Board of Education and Progressive Art Alliance, Cleveland, OH, USA

2006 Commission for the City of Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands

1995 Sedanstraße / Lister Meile subway station, Hanover, Germany

Selected Public and Institutional Collections

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA

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

Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA

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

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands

Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, USA

Selected Publications and Monographs

2022 Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles

2013 City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection, Museum of the City of New York, New York

2010 Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, Taschen

2001 New York City Aerosol Artists, Ivor L. Miller, University Press of Mississippi

1987 Spraycan Art, Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff, Thames & Hudson

1984 Subway Art, Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, Thames & Hudson

1982 Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York, Craig Castleman, MIT Press

1974 The Faith of Graffiti, Norman Mailer, Praeger