Dr. Revolt

Dr Revolt is a New York graffiti writer and graphic designer who began painting the subway in the early 1970s, in the first wave. He was an original member of the Rolling Thunder Writers, the crew that included NOC 167, Zephyr and Revolt's frequent collaborators, and which was among the most stylistically influential of the period.

His work draws on psychedelic poster art and underground comics as much as on the lettering conventions of the trains, and the colour is correspondingly loud: hot, contrasting, deliberately optical. The letters swell and interlock rather than lean, and the finished pieces have a designed quality, worked out in advance rather than improvised on the car — a discipline that came directly from his parallel life as a commercial artist.

That second career is where his work reached its widest audience. Revolt designed the logo for Yo! MTV Raps, a piece of lettering that carried the visual language of New York subway graffiti into millions of homes at the moment hip-hop went global, and did so without any explanation or framing. It remains among the most widely seen pieces of graffiti-derived design ever made.

He contributed to Wild Style and Style Wars, the two films that documented the culture as it happened, and has worked across music video, album artwork and comics. The porousness between his gallery work, his commercial work and his walls is deliberate; he has never treated them as separate practices.

The Rolling Thunder Writers occupy a particular place in the history of the form. Formed in the Bronx in the mid-1970s, the crew was among the first to treat style as something to be developed collectively and taught, and several of its members moved into design, publishing and film — carrying the visual language outward at exactly the point when the trains were being taken away from them.

He continues to paint and to exhibit in New York and internationally, and remains an active figure in the documentation and transmission of the first generation's history.

AT A GLANCE

Born in New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Logo design, Yo! MTV Raps, MTV, New York, NY, USA