Before graffiti had galleries, it had a timetable. In New York in the early 1970s, a name written on a subway car did not stay where it was painted. It pulled out of the station, crossed boroughs, ran under rivers and came back again, seen by thousands of passengers who never set out to look at art. The subway was the first exhibition space the movement ever had, and it came with its own map.
That map appears again and again in ICONS. TAKI 183, Dr. Revolt and Skeme all have works in the exhibition painted directly onto New York City subway and transit maps, and Blade draws over a photograph of a painted train. Seen together, they show writers who made their names on the system now working on the picture of the system itself.
TAKI 183: the name that went everywhere
TAKI 183 was a teenager from Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan. His tag joined TAKI, short for the Greek name Dimitraki, to 183, the street where he lived. He worked as a foot messenger, and wherever the job took him across the city, he wrote his name. On 21 July 1971 The New York Times published a story about him, and the paper described other young writers who were already following his example. The idea of being known across the whole city, rather than on a single block, spread quickly through all five boroughs.
For visitors in Cyprus there is a particular thread here: one of the founding names of graffiti belongs to a Greek-American, and it grew out of a Greek family nickname. His work in the exhibition, NYC Subway Map (2019), is painted in aerosol and acrylic on a map of the network his name once travelled.
Dr. Revolt: from the Broadway line to all-city
Dr. Revolt began writing in the 1970s and was an original member of the Rolling Thunder Writers (RTW), a crew formed in 1977 whose members painted their first full-colour pieces on the Broadway local line, the No. 1 train. He became known there for bright pieces with a psychedelic, comic-book energy, before taking his name across the city. He went on to contribute to Wild Style and Style Wars, the two films that carried New York graffiti to audiences far beyond the city.
Both of his works in ICONS, Diabolic Doctor Revolt and Revolt Map, are painted in spray paint and acrylic on subway maps.
Skeme: a return after twenty-eight years
Skeme started writing as a teenager at the end of the 1970s. In 1980 he moved from the insides of the trains to the outsides, painting pieces, whole cars and throw-ups, and worked alongside writers including DAZE and the pioneer PHASE 2. He appeared, together with his mother, in Style Wars (1983). Soon after the filming he joined the United States Army, where he served for twenty-eight years. When he retired in 2010, he found many of his old partners still painting, and he picked up the spray can again.
His work Raid!!!! (2020) is painted in aerosol on a New York City transit map: a writer who left the trains in the early 1980s, returning to the same network on paper almost four decades later.
Blade: drawing over the photograph
Blade, who grew up in the Bronx, is credited with painting more than 5,000 trains between 1972 and 1984, and his whole cars set a standard that other writers tried to match. His trains were photographed by Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper, whose book Subway Art (1984) took New York graffiti to readers around the world. Chalfant developed a way of photographing trains in sequence, so that an entire painted car could be recorded in one image.
In CRAZY 5 Again (2016), Blade works in marker and paint marker on a print of one of Chalfant’s train photographs. The title names his crew, The Crazy 5, formed in the Bronx in the early 1970s. The crew was later rebuilt by SEEN as The Cool 5, keeping the initials TC5, with Lady Pink among its members.
Why the map
The map is an object with its own history. Massimo Vignelli’s elegant diagram of 1972 proved hard for passengers to use and was replaced in 1979 by a more geographic design from Michael Hertz Associates, which remained the official map until a new design arrived in April 2025. It is among the most familiar printed images in New York, made for everyone who rides the trains.
That is what makes it such a fitting surface. A canvas belongs to the studio. A subway map belongs to the public, to strangers in transit, to the same audience the first writers reached without ever being invited. Painting on it brings the work back to where it began. On the first floor of ICONS, these works hang among the writers of Graffiti Pioneers and The New York Subway Movement, the generation that turned a transit system into a place to be seen.