Artist and collector Lee Quiñones brings street art to his living room

THE NEW YORK TIMES
Show Us Your Walls
By Brett Sokol

Tamara Warren and Lee Quiñones in their Brooklyn home with his “Midsummer’s Dream” behind them. Credit Cole Wilson for The New York Times

Some painters measure their work in inches. Lee Quiñones gauges his earliest pieces by subway-car length — his canvas of choice 40 years ago. Now 58 and a living legend of the 1970s graffiti wars, Mr. Quiñones is done with slipping into New York train yards by night. Today you can find his work in museums from the Whitney to Berlin’s Staatliche. This summer he’s represented in a Howl! Happening gallery show, curated to accompany the documentary “Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” which places Mr. Quiñones firmly within the period’s East Village canon. His own newer, introspective paintings, blending figuration with ethereal elements, are there as well. That combination, and his history of straddling the worlds of graffiti and contemporary art, is central to his collection, he said. [More]