Born in the USA

African Voices Magazine and JAMES TOP Productions Present: Born in the USA

 Saturday May 10. 2014


Moving Murals: Henry Chalfant & Martha Cooper’s All-City Graffiti Archiv

April 3rd through July 10, 2014.

Shot during the “Golden Age of Graffiti” in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Chalfant and Cooper’s images of graffitied subway cars are among the major documents of American popular culture in the late twentieth century. Moving Murals presents their images in a way that they have never been seen in New York: a wall to wall mosaic of over 850 muraled trains, creating an ultimate All City graffiti trainyard environment complimented by wallpapered photographs of the writers in their element.  And for the first time, the exhibit provides an interactive audience experience through the addition of Chalfant’s recently published iBook viewed on a large screen, complete with the train image archive, artist interviews, and videos.



These classic train murals, which have been the inspiration and guide for thousands of youthful artists around the world, did not survive on the trains for long before the city cleaned the cars, or the artists’ rivals painted over them. Chalfant and Cooper’s patience and determination in hunting down and capturing these ephemeral masterpieces with their cameras has left the world with a representative cross section of some of the best work by the most talented young artists who painted New York City’s subway cars in the seventies and eighties. These images pay homage to the young artists from the City’s underserved outer boroughs whose work—though often dismissed as vandalism—challenged contemporary fine arts standards, and lit the fuse for the street art and hip hop explosion heard around the world.

 For more info visit:citylore.org/the-gallery

City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection


City as Canvas: Graffiti Art
from the Martin Wong Collection at 

the Museum of the City of New York
February 4 – August 24, 2014



First Exhibition of the Martin Wong Collection, Featuring 150 Works by
CEY, DAZE, DONDI, FUTURA 2000, Keith Haring, LADY PINK, LEE, TRACY 168, and More New York Graffiti Artists of the 1970s–’80s 


Martin Wong, an East Village artist and collector of graffiti art, amassed a treasure trove of hundreds of works on paper and canvas—in aerosol, ink, and other mediums. The artists, including Keith Haring, Lee QuiƱones, LADY PINK, and FUTURA 2000, were seminal figures in an artistic movement that spawned a worldwide phenomenon, altering music, fashion, and popular visual culture. The exhibition City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection includes over 150 works on canvas and other media, along with photographs of graffiti writing long erased from subways and buildings.
Wong, who died of AIDS in 1999, donated his collection to the City Museum in 1994.

 For More info visit www.mcny.org/content/city-canvas