Lara Mimosa Montes's Favorite Wildstyle Writers

Coffee House Press's "CHP in the Stacks" program places authors in libraries and special collections as an artistic residency, and readers reap the benefit. In today's installment of her ongoing dispatches, Lara Mimosa Montes—author of the forthcoming Thresholes (Coffee House, 2020)—writes about Charlie Ahearn's hip-hop film, Wild Style (1983), and "wildstyle," "the term given to describe a particularly complex and difficult to decipher style of graffiti writing." "What I came to know and appreciate was, yes, the many works given to us by a generation of gifted writers, but also the work done by artists like Charlie Ahearn, Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, Martin Wong, among others," writes Montes. She explores some of her favorites here. Such as:

City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection, edited by Sean Corcoran and Carlo McCormick, New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2013.

I had no idea that the artist Martin Wong was a known collector of graffiti art until I had come across this book, published in tandem with the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibition City as Canvas, and yes, I am very sorry I had not seen this show back in 2014 before I left New York. For those skeptical of graffiti’s transition from subway to canvas, this book really made me rethink my assumption that graffiti is graffiti because it lives on in the streets and on the trains but never in a gallery. In addition to color images of works on canvas, archival exhibition shots, and some recollections contextualizing Wong’s relationship to the graffiti community by artists Lee, Daze, and Charlie Ahearn, also featured are images of drawings from various artists’ blackbooks: gold.

Read on at Coffee House.