Lee Quinones
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (June 2006) |
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. (May 2008) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
 |
Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (January 2007) |
Lee Quiñones, born 1960 in Ponce, Puerto Rico and raised in New York, is one of the most important graffiti artists. Some of his paintings belong in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
By 1976, graffiti artists like Quinones began painting entire murals using advanced techniques. Some of the most memorable of Quinones' work were political in nature, calling for an end to the arms race, for example. His work is featured in the book Subway Art (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1984).
He plays Raymond 'Zoro' in Charlie Ahearn's movie Wild Style and appears in Blondie's promo video for the song "Rapture". He plays himself in Adam Bhala Lough's Bomb the System (2002).
[edit] Biography
Lee Quiñones has been at the forefront of American avant-garde and is universally regarded as a leading figure in the development and transition of Post-Graffiti within the contemporary art world.[citation needed] Today, while displayed for an art-world audience, his work has landed in both public and private collections around the globe.
Along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Quiñones was one of the key innovators during the early days of New York’s street-art movement. In keeping with his tradition of innovation, Quiñones was also one of the first street artists to transition away from creating murals on trains and begin creating canvas-based paintings. The 1979 exhibition of his canvases at Claudio Bruni’s Galleria Medusa in Rome introduced street art to the rest of the world.“These are people who see the graffiti experience as a vocation of adolescence, the rites of passage without a sense of direction,” says Lee. “I’m not surviving by offending it or defending it, but I saw it early on as a catalyst to develop as a painter and explore the other horizons outside of a forty foot subway car. My sense of art was to create art without a reference point to art history, because this was art history in the making. A true art movement never goes by the script, instead it flips the script, faithfully reinventing itself.”
Lee was a major contributor to the first ever whole train mural, along with DOC, MONO and SLAVE. 10 subway cars were painted with a range of colourful murals and set a new benchmark for the scale of graffiti works.
While much of his current oeuvre continues to embody the energy and movement that typified his early work, it is formally much more complex. Quiñones’ art has essentially been a search for a greater metaphor than for mere topicality. His trains of the past, along with the murals and canvases of today have consistently distilled his introspective journey into self-awareness within broader, universal themes. His personal experience, the consciousness of who he is and what he feels, is but a jumping point to an epic accessible language and spatially allegorical narratives.
