Citywide: Remembering and Defending Subway Graffiti November 16, 2004 By DAVID GONZALEZ A wall in Lee Quinones's studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard is covered with words, hundreds of them, done in thick, angular strokes that dance. The style is familiar, which is no surprise. What's odd is that his name doesn't dominate the wall, since Mr. Quinones first became famous for writing LEE in huge, solid letters on subway trains. "We're All Waitin' on a Moment" reads one of the many phrases written in black marker on his studio wall. Mr. Quinones has had plenty of moments: he was among the generation of 1970's graffiti writers who went from spraying their names on trains to painting entire subway cars with intricately colored pieces. He was also in the vanguard of those who traded trains for canvas and went from eluding the police inside subway yards to courting serious collectors at galleries here and in Europe. Despite his ascension to cult figure, some moments will never come, not if the Metropolitan Transit Authority can help it. This year, as the city celebrates the subway's centennial, graffiti has not only been erased from cars, it has also been buffed from the official record. The few mentions of it now are obligatory - and brief - references to it as a plague that epitomized a chaotic and decrepit city. Mr. Quinones understands the discomfort. He has confronted it ever since he was a teenager who used to watch commuters' faces as they saw his painted cars rumble into stations carrying messages that ranged from playful to political. "You felt people were kind of intimidated," said Mr. Quinones, 44. "They were adults watching something created by youths while everybody was asleep. There was an agenda here for us, not wanton vandalism. But the M.T.A. has not wanted to admit that, because our work was becoming more political and less individual." Two galleries have mounted exhibitions to commemorate the era. Marcoart, on the Lower East Side, is displaying 100 subway maps tagged by various graffiti writers. And more than 100 artists have painted whole train cars - albeit tiny model trains - for a show at the Showroom NYC, in the East Village. "We have our own history, and I want transit historians to realize they're missing something," said Raul Cordero, 45, also known as Duro, whose work occupies a place of honor in the show. "Whenever the train rolled, part of me rolled with it." Many riders, who endured daily visual assaults of paint-slathered windows and sometimes offensive writings, are hardly nostalgic for the era. Similarly, transit officials - who declared the system graffiti- free in May 1989 - have a less-romantic assessment. "Irrespective of the art argument, that was a time when the system looked like nobody was in charge," said Paul Fleuranges, a transit authority spokesman. "It was vandalism. If it was art, they wouldn't have had to scale fences, dodge dogs and cops. " Yet the work of the top graffiti writers of the 1970's and early 1980's, which by some estimates includes several dozen at most, documents a crucial component of early hip-hop culture. That culture - where teenagers without bands made music by mixing song snippets and artists without studios painted entire subway lines - has since become a worldwide (and multibillion-dollar) phenomenon. Its influence is such that some techniques originated by graffiti writers are now commonplace. Ivor L. Miller, author of "Aerosol Kingdom" (University Press of Mississippi, 2002), noted how the sides of buses in some cities are covered with a single advertisement. Even in New York, celebratory signs for the Mets and Yankees have festooned trains. "It has been co-opted by corporations to sell products," he said. "Those advertisements subvert the very logic of the system. When you see whole cars covered with an ad, that's O.K. because it's paid for. It's not done by kids from the street." He added that money - or the lack of it - might explain why officials refuse to admit that some of the subway painters actually had talent. Rather than buy space, they were visual squatters. "It is class warfare," he said. "These are self-taught kids who did not go to school to do what they did." Christopher Ellis, who is better known as Daze, first learned about graffiti from the sketchbooks toted by his classmates at the High School of Art and Design. The real challenge came when he moved up to trains. He said he saw the subway car paintings as a way of adding a defiant touch of life to the South Bronx when entire blocks had been obliterated. "There was something positive coming out of these desolate environments," he insisted the other day, before going to Brazil for an exhibition of his work. "That was when the Bronx was burning, yet there were these trains with color." Mr. Ellis, 42, and John Matos, 43, have shared a studio near 149th Street and Third Avenue in the Bronx for 20 years now. They could probably afford to move, but they say their location ensures that only serious collectors come their way to spend as much as $25,000 on a canvas. They are in the enviable position of turning down work. Though Mr. Ellis has come a long way from the subway, the system still fascinates him, at least as subject matter for a recent series of paintings of stations. The series revisits some of the places he used to go to paint trains in Queens and the Bronx. In one painting of the Zerega Avenue station on the No. 6 line, a lone police officer stands on a platform with spotless walls. "Graffiti used to make the subway ride more interesting for me, even if I was looking at something other than my work," he said. "Now, like anyone else, I'm more concerned with getting to where I am going as fast as I can." Yet their years on the trains have affected their artistic vision. Some of them talk about not being afraid to use bold colors. Others say they can paint in tight spaces. Many said speed was still a hallmark of their technique. Mr. Matos, who earlier this year had a show in Paris, said the much-dreaded buff - the machine that sort of scrubbed the paint off subway cars - actually did many of them a service. "I thank the M.T.A. for buffing the trains," Mr. Matos, known as Crash, said. "There is nothing left but the history, and this history is what propelled us. How could I hold it against the M.T.A.? What we were doing was illegal. We weren't supposed to be there. What we had, we took." Few have taken it as far as Mr. Quinones. His studio is a soft-lit space tucked into an industrial landscape of towering cranes and mammoth sheds. Inside, books and paintings reflect his interests - trains and cars, buildings and machines. The studio is like his dream clubhouse, since he grew up in the projects on the other side of the East River. Moses-like, he holds up two panels from subway cars featuring vintage graffiti. "To me, the waterfront and its machines were always an integral part of what made New York function," he said. "I was always interested in the shape of things, how they functioned, how their charisma was built up by the air around them." Few things, he said, had the aura of a subway car. "I love the way they rocked," he said. "They had a ghetto strut to them. It was aggressive." So was his graffiti, sometimes touching upon crime or the possibility of nuclear doom. His more recent paintings still have attitude. One of them is a 9/11-themed vista of Lower Manhattan's rooftops showing military helicopters creeping into ground zero. Another is of people covering their ears and hunching up their shoulders as they watch drag racers. A Parisian collector once told him his work was unnerving. It was a compliment. A quarter-century ago, some New York commuters said the same thing for very different reasons. Mr. Quinones said maybe they'll change their minds in the next 25 years. "If people are going to live in the dark, I'll leave the light on for them," he said. "The art will explain it all."