Lee Quiñones

Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present Quinquagenary, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the legendary career of New York artist Lee Quiñones. Quiñones made a name for himself while still in his teens with bold, whole-car subway pieces and handball court murals that often incorporated poetry, aphorisms, or sarcasm alongside explosive, comic-inflected imagery. Quiñones pioneered a particular East Coast style that found its zenith on the moving metal canvases of the MTA. The artist continues to innovate in paintings and drawings that employ the aesthetic vocabulary of graffiti in works that are tightly controlled, compositionally complex, and socially engaged.

The exhibition features a new series of Spit paintings, deriving their name from the act of priming a paint marker. These works straddle the line between gallery and street, pairing tags and graffiti writing with bold, expressionist painting. Quiñones honors the tools of the artform, using spray paint and paint markers to create layered abstract compositions. On this 50th anniversary, the artist also looks back to his beginnings making art on the run, in one work depicting his own spray cans hidden away in the days when the city was his studio.

The exhibition coincides with the release of a comprehensive monograph on the work of pioneering subway artist, Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond (Damiani Books, 2024): a sweeping overview of Quiñones’ five-decade oeuvre, as he moved from subway cars and street murals to art galleries and museums. The monograph pairs full-color images of Quiñones’ street art works, paintings, and drawings with scholarship by art historians and reminiscences by his friends. Edited by Tamara Warren, the book features an introduction by Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), and tributes by Isolde Brielmaier, Bisa Butler, William Cordova, Futura, Debbie Harry, Leslie Hewitt, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, Odili Donald Odita, José Parlá, and Allan Schwartzman.