{"id":305567,"date":"2025-07-31T03:19:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T03:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/305567\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T03:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T03:19:09","slug":"a-train-nearly-took-my-head-off-how-lady-pink-shook-up-the-macho-men-of-new-yorks-graffiti-scene-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/305567\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A train nearly took my head off\u2019: how Lady Pink shook up the macho men of New York\u2019s graffiti scene | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lady Pink was five when she killed her first snake \u2013 with her bare feet. \u201cThat shows what a precocious and fearless kid I was,\u201d says the 61-year-old. Even over the phone from upstate New York, the venerated graffiti artist is a force to be reckoned with, talking at a breakneck tempo punctuated by bursts of raucous laughter. There\u2019s a sense that this energy might quickly combust too \u2013 she admits she \u201ctotally lost it\u201d while preparing for her current solo show, Miss Subway NYC, at D\u2019Stassi Art<\/a> in London.<\/p>\n

The exhibition sees her vividly recreate a New York City subway station. There are paintings in eye-popping colours depicting trains, train yards and playful portraits of the characters you typically see there: a busker in a cat costume, an elderly lady with a shopping cart and a chihuahua. With the help of her husband, fellow graffiti artist Smith, she has even meticulously reproduced layers of tags on the walls from her halcyon days, when she would risk arrest \u2013 and sometimes her life \u2013 to spray across the city at night. On the show\u2019s opening night, more than 1,000 people showed up to pay their respects to the grande dame of graf.<\/p>\n

I invited Keith Haring to paint a train. Dude was not down \u2013 he didn\u2019t want to break the law<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lady Pink was born Sandra Fabara in Ambato, Ecuador, in 1964. Her story begins on her grandparents\u2019 sugarcane plantation in the Amazon rainforest \u2013 a vast, wild terrain that, like the snake who met its fate at her feet, didn\u2019t intimidate her. Her mother had returned after leaving Pink\u2019s father, an agricultural engineer who was a \u201cwomaniser, gambler, cheater \u2026 \u201d. As soon as she had enough money, when Pink was seven, they left Ecuador for New York City. \u201cWhen we came here, we had no papers, we didn\u2019t speak the language.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I cried for a whole month\u2019 \u2026 David and Sandra, First Love. Photograph: Courtesy of Lady Pink<\/p>\n

Pink was a self-assured, determined and talented kid who quickly learned how to channel her pain and grief into creativity. She first got into graffiti at 15, after her boyfriend was arrested for tagging and sent to live with relatives in Puerto Rico. \u201cI cried for a whole month, then I started tagging his name everywhere.\u201d A painting in her London show of the artist as a teen kissing a handsome boy pays tribute to this defining moment in her personal history.<\/p>\n

When she started high school in Queens, she met \u201ckids who knew how to get into yards and tunnels. The more they said, \u2018You can\u2019t, you\u2019re a girl,\u2019 the more I had to prove them wrong. I was stubborn as a mule. I was crazy.\u201d As one of the only women accepted by the notoriously macho graffiti scene in New York in the late 1970s, she quickly gained a reputation for tagging subway trains. \u201cWe are like a guild, a clannish, tribal group who go out at night and watch each other\u2019s backs.\u201d<\/p>\n

She later earned her official moniker \u201cPink\u201d from a fellow member of TC5 crew, Seen. \u201cI was the only female in the city painting, and I needed a female name so everyone would know our crew tolerated a female,\u201d she explains. \u201cI knew I was the token female and that got my foot in the door \u2013 but to keep up with the big bad boys, I had to back it up with real talent too. There was sexism of course, but I\u2019m a little bit of a badass. I don\u2019t appreciate being walked over and I stand up strongly for myself. Even if I\u2019m petite, I\u2019m loud. Don\u2019t judge me by my size, judge me by how big and fast I paint!\u201d<\/p>\n

She added the \u201cLady\u201d title \u2013 at first inspired by the European nobility in the historical romance novels she was reading. \u201cBut I don\u2019t write Lady \u2013 I\u2019m terrible at the letter Y.\u201d Later she used the Lady title to avoid confusion with the pop singer of the same name \u2013 who approached the artist to design her first album cover. \u201cI said, \u2018Hell no!\u2019 Are you kidding me? But she\u2019s a fan, I\u2019m not going to say anything bad about her, she\u2019s fine, she sings fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Subway Village Pink Train, 2022, acrylic on canvas. Photograph: Courtesy of Lady Pink<\/p>\n

As a young woman out at night in New York\u2019s most insalubrious neighbourhoods in 1979, Pink was especially vulnerable. \u201cI would dress like a boy and pretend to be a boy. The teens I ran with weren\u2019t much bigger than me and I knew they weren\u2019t there to protect me if shit went down. You\u2019re in the worst neighbourhoods of New York City relying on the kindness of strangers to save your life \u2013 you\u2019ve got to be prepared. What happens in the dark alleys of cities, you don\u2019t want to know. You shake a spray can and hope they let you live.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBombing\u201d subway trains is one of the most perilous activities of graffiti \u2013 \u201cloads of kids have died doing it, getting run over by the trains or electrocuted. It still happens. It\u2019s live electricity: if you touch the rail you will die.\u201d How did she survive? \u201cYou don\u2019t stumble in like you\u2019re drunk, it\u2019s like a military manoeuvre. You know the train schedules, where to walk, where to hide. You have all of that figured out ahead of time. You need to be sure where you\u2019re going when you\u2019re running like panicked rats in the dark maze.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2018What happens in the dark alleys, you don\u2019t want to know\u2019 \u2026 Lady Pink in New York. Photograph: PinkSmith Courtesy of Lady Pink<\/p>\n

Still, there were more than a few close calls over the years. She recalls she once sliced her finger open and \u201cit was bleeding badly, it was a terrible cut and I probably should have had it stitched, but I just stuck it in my pocket and it quietly bled in there. I didn\u2019t want people to say: \u2018Oh you\u2019re a girl you\u2019re hurt and crying, you\u2019re going to slow us down,\u2019 \u2013 you\u2019ve got to be a good soldier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another time, there was a near miss with an unforeseen moving train. \u201cI had gone to pee and I thought I could just walk it,\u201d she laughs. \u201cThen there was a train coming and it was doing a weird curve, slanting into the wall. At the last minute I ducked, but if I had stayed standing the train would\u2019ve taken my head off. After that, I just ran at top speed. I can\u2019t believe I survived it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 1980s were a whirlwind. She rose to fame in 1983 after featuring in Wild Style, the cult film that launched American hip-hop culture globally. Her spray-painted canvases, horror vacui compositions with bold, attention-grabbing colours of scenes inspired by the street, began to be accepted in conventional, legal art spaces, and in 1984 she was included in MoMA PS1\u2019s The New Portrait alongside Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. \u201cNo one was aware it was going to launch anything, we were just in it for the moment and the money. People told us the art market was fickle and eventually we\u2019d have to get jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018It was wild out there\u2019 \u2026 Miss Subway NYC 2025. Photograph: Courtesy of Lady Pink<\/p>\n

Once she invited Haring to come to paint a train with her. \u201cJust me and him, no machismo \u2013 but dude was not down, he didn\u2019t want to cross the line of breaking laws. What he did was chalk on boards. He was a white dude; he wasn\u2019t incurring any kind of arrests. They weren\u2019t graffiti artists, but they were the original street artists. Graffiti artists work with spray, with fonts \u2013 and we hit stuff with wheels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pink also received an invitation from Jenny Holzer<\/a>, who was wheatpasting her Truisms posters in Manhattan. \u201cWe were like the only women going out at night doing things. She was a tall lady, like two metres, she would wear a hoodie and a big coat so she could pass off as a man going around at night alone. I am very small and I couldn\u2019t pass off like that, so I had to run with a crew. She reached out to me and suggested we collaborate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Holzer had done up an entire building in the Lower East Side. \u201cIt was wild out there at that time, there were a lot of people doing drugs, there was a lot of crime. But she made this beautiful, safe building, and I loved going there and working with her.\u201d Holzer would prep three-metre-square canvases for Lady Pink to spray paint her images on, and Holzer paired them with text. The works were later shown at MoMA and Tate Modern. In 1983, 19-year-old Pink was photographed by Lisa Kahane wearing a vest emblazoned with Holzer\u2019s famous words: \u201cAbuse of power comes as no surprise\u201d \u2013 in 2017 the photo went viral as an emblem of the #MeToo movement.<\/p>\n

Playful portraits \u2026 The Strap Hanger, 2025, from Pink\u2019s London exhibition. Photograph: Courtesy of Lady Pink<\/p>\n

Though artwork sales and interest did wane in the late 1980s, Pink pivoted. She set up a mural company with her husband, doing public commissions and working in communities. While many of her peers \u201ccouldn\u2019t handle the business, they couldn\u2019t leave the ghetto behind, they couldn\u2019t show up on time or answer a phone call\u201d, she says she was able to \u201cadapt to polite society. Artists don\u2019t know how to hustle, and you\u2019ve gotta hustle, hustle, hustle. Some don\u2019t have the cojones. But good grief, you\u2019ve got to go knocking on doors!\u201d<\/p>\n

She stopped illegally painting subway trains decades ago \u2013 \u201cnow I save my crazy for the galleries\u201d \u2013 but the spirit of the subway lives on in the London show. And she says she\u2019s still paying the price for her years of youthful rebellion. Twelve years ago, she and her husband moved upstate after \u201cone too many\u201d police raids on their home in NYC. \u201cThey took my stuff \u2013 including my husband \u2013 and messed with us. We had to spend money on an expensive attorney. They\u2019ve told me to stick to the indoor stuff and not paint big old murals because they inspire people. I said yeah \u2013 community people, poets, artists, I should hope I inspire people!\u201d<\/p>\n

One thing is for sure: she doesn\u2019t have any regrets. \u201cStreet art is the biggest art movement, we are in every corner of the world. By whatever means possible, we are taking over this world, it\u2019s our whole plan! I think it\u2019s cool, man \u2013 you\u2019ve got to take control of your environment. You don\u2019t need an MA to be an artist, you just need a little paint plus a little courage. Just do it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Lady Pink: Miss Subway NYC is at D\u2019Stassi Art, London<\/a>, until late September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lady Pink was five when she killed her first snake \u2013 with her bare feet. \u201cThat shows what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3939],"tags":[4021,4020,4022,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-305567","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114945691713680442","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}