When Henry Chalfant arrived in New York City from suburban Pittsburgh in 1973, as an aspiring sculptor, he found a place teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. This was “Ford to City: Drop Dead” New York. But amid the turmoil a new form of art making was taking shape — one that took up space where it could, which was mostly everywhere.
As a typographical language, graffiti was still raw, a new kind of American expressionism rooted in the volatility of street life, largely done by kids living on the city’s margins. The urgent scrawls of names, crowding one another for visual dominance, was a form of branding as self-determination. Within a few years, styles became increasingly baroque, entire flanks of subway cars sheathed in florid top-down murals, hurtling the city’s overlooked periphery into its pulsing center.
Photo by Jackson Krule