Before Lee Quiones was painting murals in Rome, showing his work at galleries in Paris and designing sets for music videos, he got his work to the masses via a less legal method -he spray painted subway cars.
In fact, Quiones sprayed entire cars from top to bottom creating giant, forty-foot murals.
"The size of it and the place of it gave it a sense of being very social work," he said. "By painting trains it was a vehicle, in a very literal sense, of getting my work exposed to people."
The street art movement began as a reaction to the political and social climate of New York City in the early '70s, he said, including pressures from the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the end of the Vietnam War. He said the movement, which he calls "the purist form of hip-hop," evolved as a way to make a cultural mark.
"It's easy to discount it as young people who have no sense of direction," Quiones said. "But that's not true. We were very aware that we needed to have an existence in a city that has no recollection of your existence because it's moving to fast. This is New York."
Because his graffiti art came upon people who weren't expecting art, and because the work is anonymous, he said the politics of competition and business that exist in more traditional art settings did not apply to early graffiti artists.
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"The powers that be were not going to recognize you," he said. "But your peers did."
Quiones made the transition indoors into studios and galleries in the '80s and now works in a genre called "Post-Graffitism."
Tomorrow, he will lecture on his career and the "construction and deconstruction" of graffiti in the hip-hop world at Keller Hall.
Though he's bringing his lecture on campus, Quiones says graffiti art is only starting to have a home in academia.
"It didn't come from an academic background, that's for sure," he said. "The art institutions are looking back after the 30-year cycle and saying, 'Wait a minute, there was something here.'"
Instead, he said, the graffiti movement began when young fertile minds ripened and began creating a reflection of their place and time. He said for it to be what it was, it had to be created under specific stress points which cannot be replicated in any gallery.
"It was physical," he said. "It was a lot more than painting. You were going against everything, your family and the law, to go paint on the wall. We were guided by a different force if you look at it that way."
That force, he said, was the catalyst to hip-hop. Though hip-hop is now globally recognized and graffiti is considered a part of that movement, Quiones says graffiti came first.
"Way before anybody was mixing beats or rhythmically rapping over them, the train art movement was in full swing," he said in a news release.
Graffiti is a truly American art movement, he said, and he was very fortunate to have been a part of it. Though it has not been fully accepted as the revolutionary media that it was, Quiones said it eventually will be.
"A true artist will always be open minded because that's their responsibility."
What: Lee Quiones
When: Tomorrow, 8 p.m.
Where: Keller Hall
Ticket Info: 277-4569
