NEW YORK, NY.- A comprehensive monograph on the work of a pioneering subway artist, Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond (Damiani Books, 2024) presents a sweeping overview of Quiñones’ five-decade oeuvre, as he moved from subway cars and street murals to art galleries and museums.

Street Art legend Lee Quiñones started his career at 14 years old, when he made his first spray paint mural in the New York City subway system. He eventually spray-painted murals on more than 120 subway cars, infusing kinetic elements of Futurism and social commentary into his work. Quiñones also invented the concept of the freestanding urban mural through his handball court piece, Howard the Duck (1978), and introduced spray paint-based work to international audiences upon his first formal exhibition in 1979.

The monograph pairs full-color images of Quiñones’ street art works, paintings, and drawings with scholarship by art historians and reminiscences by his friends. Edited by Tamara Warren, the book features an introduction by Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), and tributes by Isolde Brielmaier, Bisa Butler, william cordova, FUTURA, Debbie Harry, Leslie Hewitt, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, Odili Donald Odita, José Parlá, and Allan Schwartzman.

Archival photographs capture the gritty, vibrant New York City of Quiñones’ early career and images of the artist at work, including his iconic appearance in Blondie’s “Rapture” video (1980), the first rap video to air on MTV, and his lead role as Zoro in the film “Wild Style” (1983). Featured photographs are by Charlie Ahearn, Edo Bertoglio, Carl Brunn, Henry Chalfant, Martha Cooper, Eric Felisbret, Bobby Grossman, Sue Kwon, Stanley Lumax, Jason Mandella, Farrique Pesquera, Adam Reich, Chris Stein, and Mattius J. Sic.

“The young mark maker has developed into one of the most important artists of the 21st century,” writes Sirmans in the book’s introduction. “Political commentary on the state of our world is a constant in his output, but brushy almost abstract passages of color that conjure a more cerebral psychological space of mind are a big part of his artistic concerns.”

“Fifty years only comes once in a lifetime, and this quinquagenary marks the year I picked up my first spray paint can in the Lower East Side. The complexion of what life is and what it throws at you changes with every day, year, or decade. I’d like to think that the evolution of my work — style, medium, and concept — reflects that shift in perspective," says Quiñones.

This spring, Quiñones will have a solo exhibition, “Quinquagenary,” composed of new paintings and drawings, as well as historic works on paper, at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, on view from April 20 to May 25, the first of several fiftieth anniversary events.

Lee Quiñones is considered the most influential artist to emerge from the New York subway art movement for his expansive body of work that is ripe with socio-political content and intricate composition. Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1960, and raised on the Lower East Side, Quiñones started painting trains in 1974, then shifted to a studio-based practice.

Quiñones has had numerous solo shows and exhibited internationally, first at Galleria Medusa in Rome, Italy in 1979. In 1980, he had his first New York show at White Columns, ushering in an important era as the medium of spray paint expanded from public spaces to stationary canvas works. His work was included in the critical “Times Square Show” (1980); “Graffiti Art Success for America at Fashion Moda” (1980); the “New York/New Wave” show at PS1 (1981); and in “Documenta #7” in Kassel, Germany (1983). His drawings and paintings have been shown in recent years at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (2005), El Museo del Barrio (2010), the Museum of Modern Art (2011), the Museum of Contemporary Art Rome (2017), Seoul Museum of Art (2019), the Bronx Museum (2019), the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2020), the Gropius Bau (2021), and the Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies (2022). He has had solo shows at PS1, Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati, the Fun Gallery, Barbara Gladstone, Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Lisson Gallery, Barbara Farber, Nicole Klagsbrun, Charlie James, and James Fuentes. Quinones’ paintings are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Groninger Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Quiñones starred in Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 film “Wild Style,” which served as a blueprint for the burgeoning hip hop movement. He also appears in Blondie’s “Rapture” video and the film “Downtown 81.” He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.