TKID 170

Julius Cavero, who writes as TKID 170 — Terrible T-Kid 170 — was born in the Bronx and began writing in the mid-1970s, taking the number from 170th Street. He belongs to the generation that formalised style: the writers who, having inherited the practice from the first wave, turned lettering itself into the arena of competition and drove it toward the complexity now called wildstyle.

His letters are angular, interlocking and heavily arrowed, constructed rather than drawn, with a three-dimensional logic that holds together at scale. The characters that accompany them are drawn with a comic illustrator's confidence. He was among the most prolific writers on the New York subway through the late 1970s and 1980s and remained active long after most of his contemporaries had stopped, moving to walls and canvas as the trains were buffed clean.

He has worked as a designer and illustrator alongside the painting and has taught and demonstrated widely, particularly in Europe, where he has been a fixture of the mural and festival circuit for decades. That teaching role matters: a large part of what a younger European generation understands as New York style came through him directly.

His autobiography, The Nasty Terrible T-Kid 170: The Uncensored Story of the Graffiti Writer Julius Cavero, was published by From Here to Fame in 2006 and is among the more candid first-person accounts of the period, dealing with the violence and the risk as directly as with the painting.

The absence of a long exhibition record in his case reflects where he chose to put the work rather than any decline in it. TKID has continued to paint walls, legally and otherwise, for five decades, across New York, Europe and Asia, and the body of work exists largely in photographs and in the memory of the people who watched it go up.

He continues to paint and to exhibit, including a two-person exhibition with Cope2 at M2 Gallery, New York, in 2009.

AT A GLANCE

Born in the Bronx, New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

2009 — TKid 170 x Cope2, M2 Gallery, New York, NY, USA

2006 — The Nasty Terrible T-Kid 170: The Uncensored Story of the Graffiti Writer Julius Cavero, From Here to Fame