Lee Quiñones
| Lee Quiñones | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1960 (age 56–57) Ponce, Puerto Rico |
| Nationality | Puerto Rican |
| Known for | Graffiti, Painting |
| Notable work | ”Honest George” (2009) |
| Movement | Subway Graffiti |
| Patron(s) |
El Museo del Barrio Whitney Museum of Art Museum of the City New York Groninger Museum (Groningen, Netherlands) Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, Netherlands) |
George Lee Quiñones (born 1960) is a Puerto Rican artist and actor. He is one of several artists to gain fame from the New York City Subway graffiti movement.
Quiñones' style is rooted in popular culture, often with political messages, along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Quiñones was one of the innovators of New York’s street-art movement and is considered the single most influential artist to emerge from the graffiti era.
Quiñones was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, to Puerto Rican parents but raised in the Lower East Side section of Manhattan. Lee started drawing at the age of five.
He started with Subway Graffiti in 1974. By 1976, Lee was a legend, working in the shadows, leaving huge pieces of graffiti art across the subway system. As a subway graffiti artist, Lee almost exclusively painted whole cars, all together about 125 cars. Lee was a major contributor to one of the first-ever whole-trains, along with DOC, MONO and SLAVE. It was the first ever whole-train to run in traffic.
In November 1976, ten subway cars were painted with a range of colorful murals and set a new benchmark for the scale of graffiti works. This is documented in an interview with Quiñones in the book "Getting up" by Craig Castleman, MIT Press (MA) (October 1982). Quiñones appeared with several pieces in one of the most sold art books ever, Subway Art. He became an influence for youths worldwide. Although several of Quiñones' whole cars made in the 70's and 80's have attained iconic status by graffiti writers all over the world, many of the pieces are only documented in cheap instamatic photos. "The Hell Express", "Earth is Hell, Heaven is Life", "Stop the Bomb" are some of Quiñones paintings that ran for months. Quiñones pieces were left untouched by other writers and some of them ran for years even though thousands of writers were painting on subway cars at that time.
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Wikipedia