“Sometimes I think of graffiti as like second-generation psychedelia,” says Martin Wong (1946–1999) midway through a 2013 video portrait titled Graffiti Obsession: The Martin Wong Collection by Charlie Ahearn, currently on view in “Above Ground: Art from the Martin Wong Graffiti Collection.” He’s right—graffiti might even have been the AbEx of the 1980s: gestural, virulent, and loaded with social dissent. This is the second exhibition devoted to Wong’s collection (the other being 2014’s “City as Canvas”), which the artist donated to the museum shortly after being diagnosed with HIV in 1994.
Highlights include works by graffiti legends Dondi, Futura 2000, Lady Pink, QUIK, and a canvas by Stan 153, Green Krinkle in Stereo, 1983, that’s eerily reminiscent of the fold paintings by market darling Tauba Auerbach, which they began creating more than two decades later. Particularly notable is Lee Quiñones’s Breakfast at Baychester, ca. 1980, a painting (with original sketch) of an MTA 5 train parked on layup tracks, where cars not in use get stowed. The largely unfinished canvas might serve as a spectral allegory for the Reagan era and its blatant disregard of lower-income communities. Also fabulous is the sole Wong painting in the show, Sharp and Dottie, 1984, on loan from KAWS, which features graffiti writer Sharp embracing a loved one before the looming presence of an enormous brick wall. But the cream of this crop is a selection of Rammellzee’s bellicose paintings demonstrating his signature Ikonoklast Panzerism, an abstracted style of writing in which every letter is made to look like a weapon.
Wong was a remarkable chronicler of the trials and tribulations in New York’s Lower East Side, a locus of creative activity—his supporting role as archivist of the scene is neatly emphasized in “Above Ground.” It’s worth mentioning, however, that the show’s focus on “graffiti” is somewhat of a misnomer, since the designation refers to a type of unsanctioned performance in the streets. The work here ranges from preparatory sketches on paper to finished canvases more accurately called—strictly speaking—paintings. Graffiti is an intentional gesture of vandalism: it’s writing things where they’re not meant to be written. This important part of the story is not on view at the museum, but luckily the writing still appears on the walls the moment one steps outside.