LADY PINK

Lady Pink was born in Ecuador and raised in NYC. She started writing graffiti in 1979 at the age of fifteen when she soon became well known as the only female capable of competing with the boys in the graffiti subculture. By the time she began, the movement was already a decade old with heroes, legends, and villains. The subculture was organized around a master and apprentice structure, in which graffiti ‘writers’ taught new artists the precise regional lettering and hyper-specific dialectic fonts that signaled their burough of origin.

This mentorship was vital for learning not only hand control and technique, but also artistic survival skills like how to steal the paint and sneak into the subway yards without getting caught.

Graffiti was both fun and liberating, but also a dangerous type of artistic expression with difficult conditions, like a boot camp for artists. It required the physicality of jumping fences, outrunning the cops, and accessing hard-to-reach spaces.

In order to access prime canvas spaces like train cars, Lady Pink painted upside down or hanging out of windows, as she was not tall enough to reach from platform to platform like some of the male writers were able to do. There were very few women painting train cars when Lady Pink was, from 1979-1985. Those who participated mostly tagged rather than painting large-scale, whole-car pieces as Pink did. Although she was not the only woman street artist at the time, she is credited with being the first.

At the end of 1980, Pink was invited to be in the first street art gallery shows and documentaries. In 1982, she had a starring role in the motion picture “Wild Style”, known as the first hip-hop movie, which delved into the evolution of break-dancing and graffiti. That role and her other significant contributions to graffiti have made her a cult figure in the hip-hop subculture.

As the style began to gain recognition, Pink showed her art in more traditional institutions like galleries and museums, where collectors were excited to acquire graffiti pieces on canvas. She continued to work on walls and train cars and also incorporated business skills to build her graffiti writing into an art career.

Pink did not originally envision herself as an artist, but rather as an architect, following in the footsteps of her father and brothers. This basis of her education at the High School of Art and Design, paired with her fondness for buildings, is reflected in her art. She alters her environment with paint in the manner that an architect or engineer might with metal.

Her iconic ‘Brick Ladies’ are an example of her affinity to architecture and thematic emphasis on strong women. She combines sensuality with strength and metaphorically represents women as the bedrock of a city’s literal and cultural architecture.

In accordance with the graffiti tradition of apprenticeship, Pink practices community stewardship through education. For twenty-four years, she has led a mural workshop at The Frank Sinatra School of The Arts High School thanks to a Martin Wong Foundation arts education grant. This program guides students in their potential art careers and leaves a positive impact on their lives and overall self-confidence. Street art especially requires an artist to be courageous, a lesson that Pink says cannot be taught but can be inspired through one person’s belief in young artists.

As a leader in the rise of graffiti-based art, Lady Pink’s canvases have entered important art collections such as those of the Whitney Museum, the MET, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, and the MoMA. She has not only established herself in the fine arts world, but also in the fashion world and has collaborated with Louis Vuitton, Supreme, and Lancôme.

SELECTED WORKS