Uptown & Downtown

Subway map graffiti art by the most influential artists of the movement in its prime.

NewYork graffiti writers who cut their teeth painting trains in the ’70s and ’80s transferOld Skool street art to a more permanent, collectible medium in this book, usingtransit maps, instead of subway cars, as canvases. GHOST,T-KID,QUIK, REVOLT, BLADE, SHAME125, COPE2,SKEME,and others decorated ordinary 23″ 32″ MTAmaps with their personal tags and graphicsechoing the heyday of New York traingraffiti.

Here, sixteen sections, one for each writer, feature a total of more than100 maps, as well as brief statements about the painters’ artistic evolution andstyle. Like a dynamic “piece book,” or sketchbook, this collection isan exclusive sampling of the painters’ signature strokes and tags in portableform. In fact, many of the artists featured here have used subway-map art as aspringboard from the fleeting genre of train-tagging to the sturdier platform of theinternational art gallery circuit.[AuthorName]By Alan Bortman[/AuthorName][AuthorBio]Alan Bortman lives in the greater Boston area. He is the curator of DirtyPilot.com,an urban art and graffiti art store featuring well-known and underground artists.[/AuthorBio][NumIllustration]105 color photos[/NumIllustration][CoAuthor][/CoAuthor][SubTitle]Old Skool Paintings on NYC Subway Maps[/SubTitle][ColorPattern]105 color photos[/ColorPattern]