1976: Lee Quiñones

This week, Janice Headley takes us back to 1976 with an exclusive interview with the graffiti artist, Lee Quiñones. He and his crew, The Fabulous Five, made history by tagging a ten-car train in a single night.

Written & produced by Janice Headley.

Mixed & mastered by Roddy Nikpour. 

Support the podcast: kexp.org/50hiphop 

All year long, we’ve been celebrating the 50th anniversary of hip-hop on this podcast, but we’ve mostly been focusing on the music.

Hip-hop is more than just a musical genre. It’s a culture combined of four elements: DJ’ing, rapping or MC’ing, B-Boying or breakdancing, and, finally, graffiti. The artistry of hip-hop is captured beautifully in the 1983 cult classic film Wild Style, which just happens to star today’s very special guest, legendary New York City graffiti artist Lee Quiñones.

Lee was born in Puerto Rico, and raised in the Lower East Side. As a pre-teen, he began hitting the streets, tagging subway cars. Which quickly grew into painting large intricate murals over the entire car, a 50 ft x 8 ft metal canvas. His work was colorful and thoughtful, often with an underlying message of social justice. He’d write poetic messages like “If we don’t use our heads now, we may lose our tails later” and “If art like this is a crime, let God forgive me.” 

He eventually joined the Fabulous Five graffiti crew, and in the winter of 1976, they did their biggest hit to date: in one single night, Lee and the Fabulous Five tagged an entire 10-car subway line. The act crowned Lee a hip-hop folk hero, and was a defining moment in the artist’s career.

In an exclusive interview with KEXP, Lee talks with us about that night and how he feels to be celebrating 50 years of hip-hop.

KEXP: Lee Quiñones, thank you so much for joining us. 

Lee: ​​Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

You have had an amazing art career over the past 50 years, starting in 1974, when a 14-year-old you first started doing graffiti. What inspired you to pick up that spray paint can?

It was basically my curiosity. So many global events were at play at the time. The Vietnam War's still on, unofficially. Lots of social and racial problems were plaguing the city. The city was pretty much on a huge deficit. So there was, basically, was an open door — as a creative, as a visual person myself — to latch on to something that was much more organic and natural to me. You know, picking up a pencil and a paper is the easiest thing and picking up alongside this movement, that was started by young people, was a natural, so I think I just wanted to investigate that.

I love that. And so we're here today to talk about an iconic moment early in your career. In 1976, you were only 16-years-old and you and the Fabulous Five crew hit a ten-car subway train in one night. Can you tell us about the Fabulous Five?  

They were quite an eclectic group of guys. They were very interesting. They came from all walks of life, all different ethnicities, and economic backgrounds. Challenged, as I was. And they were like a brotherhood. They were basically a quintet of guys that were really interested in creating personas and creating an existence. And I think that's the real backbone of the movement was to create a sense of self and self agency in a very anonymous way, strangely enough, because we were sort of an enigma force at that time.

So these guys latched on to what I was already doing in 1975, which by that year, when you think about it, starting in '74, by '75, I'm already creating big entire whole cars, subway car murals, within a year's time. They somehow found a new outlet. So they banded together alongside with me and created a really good, strong brotherhood of creativeness. It was very unique at the time.

How did you guys initially meet?

The funny story is that they just met me on a train station, by coincidence, looking out for one of my cars. So, I had done a car the night before, and they already were aware that my work was running on the rails. They were just intrigued like, who is this guy? What is this force? Is this a group of people working that fast? And it was just myself. I was very self determined at that early age to create a new dialog and a new conversation around the movement itself. Because I just felt like even by 1975, I thought that the graffiti movement had probably achieved everything that it could achieve. So that's how I just said, I want to bring it up a notch. I want to bring up the volume. Push the envelope. All of those things. And I think that's what made them very curious to seek me out. And then, a classic New York serendipitous moment: we met in the subway station, my home station on Brooklyn Bridge. There were like, How could you be Lee? I'm like, I am. And I didn't know who they were, but I felt the vibe in the room at that point. I felt that this was a group of guys that I could find sanctuary in. And they found inspiration in my work. 

Whose idea was it to do ten cars in one night?

A sort of crazy notion came to me that I should create... It's not only just to create a huge accordion mural, if you want to call it — this is when ten cars are connected, they're coupled, and they're sort of like an accordion worm, worming itself through the city. I looked at it more as a statement that this movement was now reaching for the sky, that it was moving on to a new plateau, and that there was a new conversation that needed to be had in the room. So that was my first intuition, to create something that had never been done before or achieved to the point where it would come out to the public the way it did.  

So, they, the Fabulous Five, thought that I was out of my mind, and I still think I am. But, you know, craziness makes things happen, right? So, it's when you're being too reserved and maybe conserved that you just stay stagnant and idle. But when you think about things and in the sense like, well, no one's ever done it, so why hasn't anyone tried to challenge that? And, you know, as history now knows, it was a huge success. So, they thought I was crazy, and I thought I was crazy not to do it. 

Was there an overall concept for the ten cars?

Well, because I had been thinking about this project, if you want to call it — or maybe even, a caper — I was thinking about it conceptually. I was thinking about it as sort of a stream of colors, because I always looked at subways as these moving objects. They're either idle in front of you to gobble you up, and swallow you up, or spit you out at the stations. But when it's in motion, on express tracks, it's creating this whole new dynamic and this whole new energy. So, I wanted to create something that would be very flashy, but it would be very stimulating, color-wise. So, I designed the majority of the cars to be legible, first and foremost, so that you could see it from afar, especially with the elevated structures, up in the upper reaches of the Bronx or down in Brooklyn. I knew that this train, if it was successful, it would travel a certain length, going through a gauntlet of all kinds of emotions from people. I wanted it to be very identifiable, because by that time, there was so much work happening on the subways, I wanted it to stand out as that one statement that this is now growing legs, it's upping the temperature in the room. And it was quite a feat. It was quite a feat. 

What line was it? And why did you target that particular one?

Well, first and foremost, the IRT Lexington Avenue Number 5 was my home line. Number five is my favorite number. The Fabulous Five came from the Five Boroughs. There's a number of reasons why, but by happenstance, that "five" has always been part of my "numerical miracle." 

But I picked that line strategically because I knew that it went through different neighborhoods in the city. Some neighbors would embrace it. Some neighborhoods would probably be a little confused, maybe even defused at some moments. I think a lot of New Yorkers were, you know, they've seen it all, but this was something that they'd never seen ever. And I wanted to bring that surprise onto the table. So the 5 was picked because it was basically the rolling Whitney Museum on wheels to me. And that was because it went through the privileged and more gilded neighborhoods of Park Avenue and Madison Avenue. And then it went into the South Bronx, which was a challenged neighborhood, you know, marginalized people, dystopian atmosphere, hopelessness. And then into the northeast Bronx, where there was, again, a suburban existence, white picket fences and well-groomed lawns. And I just felt that a train that can travel from those different temperatures in the room? That was the best choice for such a statement.

What do you remember of that night?

Well, I remember it like it was yesterday. I already have 40 pages written about it, but I won't give away the ending, like they say. But it was quite a feat. And not only the physical parts of it, the strain, you know, just like the constant painting with no rest in between, because you're working within a window of time. You can put it as a mixture of Navy SEALs meets the traditional Japanese ninja kind of operation where it had to be very, very seriously sort of synchronized. 

And I thought it out in my head a year before, because initially I was going to do it on my own, not thinking that anyone would come on board. But then I meet the Fabulous Five. When they came on board and they saw the seriousness in my eyes, that's when I knew that there was a brotherhood there. And that's when they knew that, this kid here is out of his mind, but we're going to follow suit. He has a certain trajectory that we just need to be part of. We can't question it. 

So, it was a night to remember. There's a few moments in my career that I've reached that light bulb moment where I've said to myself, Wow, I've arrived as an artist. And that was one of my first arrivals. Maybe it was more the arrival of bravado and maybe, you know, having cojones, as they say.

And once we got through that the effects of it the next day were… it's unimaginable how in 1976, when the whole city is burning down – I'm sorry, the Bronx was burning, but so was the Lower East Side. So was Bushwick. So was Jamaica, Queens. So was Stapleton, Staten Island. So was many parts of the city that were very much challenged – and the fire down below was the heart and soul of a young group of people that said, We want to paint the town red. We don't want to spill red from our bodies, our minds, our potential. And I just felt that this was a way of sort of creating a dialog. This is just the start of a much bigger potential. 

...the fire down below was the heart and soul of a young group of people that said, We want to paint the town red. We don't want to spill red from our bodies, our minds, our potential.

Do you remember the first time you saw it go by and what your feelings were? 

Well, long story short, I was chasing it pretty much the majority of the day. When I came back onto the station that morning, already other graffitists had said, you know, with wide eyes open and jaws dropped, I remember them saying, it just went uptown. "It." It was "it." They couldn't even fathom a word for it, like your "masterpiece" or anything. They just said "it" just left the station. And I knew that that was a special moment. I could smell it in the station. I could smell the fresh paint in the station. So, you know, I chased it all the way up to the Bronx where they terminate and then they come back. So it was that time that when I saw it coming back, as I was waiting for it, I knew that I had achieved and reached a special moment in art history. 

And I had breached the theoretical limitations that some of us sort of set on ourselves, and even society, because, you know, you have to remember that most of society were pointing fingers at us. It was easy to create a dialog or a sort of very closed-minded conversation around this tangible thing of, “yeah, these trains are being overtaken and destroyed and vandalized by these young, misdirected, misfiring youth.” When it was the other way around. We were looking outside of ourselves, looking at city government failing us, federal government saying "drop dead" to New York. We're trying to invent something from nothing, because there was nothing there left. 

It's an amazing feat that so many young individuals took on to the visual arts through this movement. I just felt that I was the messenger trying to make a louder statement in a very noisy town that was too busy for itself, to acknowledge its young. And this was the vehicle. These were the vehicles. These were literally the vehicles that were used to create. I mean, when you think about Instagram… I mean, this is 40 years before Instagram that this young generation was creating a conversation using these vehicles, moving in and out of light. It's a miracle on how that all came to be. 

This movement is very elastic in that way. That it lives so much into the future. It's transcendent. It's transformative. It introduces the idea of transition. It's fine to change. It's fine to challenge yourself, and not feel comfortable in a bubble or in a pocket or a compartment. And that's what I thought at 15 years old. I am not just going to be another part of the alphabet soup going on here. I'm going to breach those velvet ropes of comfort and I'm going to bring it, like they say. I'm going to bring it because we need to turn the page and create something not referencing art history, but making art history. 

You absolutely made art history! And this leads me to my final question, which is, you know, 50 years of hip-hop and you were at the epicenter of this cultural movement. How does it feel to be celebrating this 50 year milestone? 

First and foremost, I think the word that comes to my head is "perseverance." When you're persistent and consistent with your practice, believing that there is something there, not just for yourself, but for everyone around you, that's the power of hip-hop. That's the phenomenon of hip-hop. For myself, I was already painting before “hip-hop” was even a term. And I think just seeing all this music come together and, you know, compelling people to come to the stage and then create all these other, sort of, annex hurricanes around it. One storm spawns another and pushes the other to the outer reaches of who knows where, right? 

So, I'm very proud to still be here. It's very exciting to see. But I'm here now for my 50th anniversary, which is next year. 2024. So, 1974, I pick up my first cans of compressed color, as I like to call them. And I saved those colors off the dusty racks of hardware stores, never to see the light of day and creating light with them, in the most darkest, most compressed places on earth, right? The subways. So next year's my 50th anniversary, and I'm proud to be looking forward to it in so many ways, with so many new projects.

When you're persistent and consistent with your practice, believing that there is something there, not just for yourself, but for everyone around you... that's the power of hip-hop.

One of those projects is a book – can you tell us more about that?

Well, it's probably one of the most anticipated books coming from this sector of the woods. It wasn't strategic to wait this long. I just wanted to live life and grow through it alongside my work on canvas. So I think now, coming to the dawning of the 50th anniversary, it's appropriate to have a book that's going to showcase my work as an artist, not just as a phenomenon, but to put it all in context for people that this started from the bowels of the city and now has reached the museums of the world. So I'm very excited about the release, which will be spring of April, May of 2024, that I am planning to coincide with several shows that are going to highlight some of the new works that I'm working on in the studio, so it’s very exciting.

You know, when you write a book, or you do a documentary, or whatever it is, that you open up the aperture of your life. I always look at it as closing one chapter and enabling you to see, in clarity, what's ahead for you. So again, that ten car train was opening the clarity of — you know, which could've been very foggy. But after that feat, I was like, I'm on my way. I know my lane. I'm not getting off this highway. There's no exits for me. The same thing with my work on canvas. And this book will be the — I won't let it out of the bag again, but there'll be a lot to digest.

We cannot wait. Lee Quiñones, thank you so much again for your time and for sharing these wonderful, inspiring stories.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me in. 

Get the complete story behind Lee Quiñones’ 1976 10-car caper via his book, available in Spring 2024. The movie Wild Style celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. It’s available for streaming via the Criterion Channel and additional streaming services.