Photos by Sundiata Acree a.k.a Tha Snyper
My man Sundi went to Presents Gallery in Brooklyn for a graffiti exhibit called Tales of the RTW. He got some colorful photos of the art on display, posted below. Henry Chalfant, author of Subway Art and producer of graf documentary Style Wars, sums up the exhibit with a brief but well-penned essay:
RTW, Rolling Thunder Writers, is one of the legendary crews of New York City teenagers that challenged the industrial power of 600 miles of steel and thousands of tons of machinery that run like a blood vessel through the city. Rolling Thunder Writers grew up in an era filled with new art forms, music and style.
Bilrock, whose family proudly shares traces of Pequot and Chickasaw blood, named the crew after the Native American Medicine Man, Rolling Thunder. Bil’s inspiration for the name came from his sister and her boyfriend an Oglala Sioux, who worked with AIM. Like the Black Panthers, Young Lords and other liberation movements around the globe, Native Americans were struggling to throw off the yoke of white supremacy and imperialism. It was a turbulent time for kids growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the sixties and seventies. The spirit of the time was anti-war and anti-authoritarian. There was a belief in the transforming power of psychedelic drugs. Graffiti introduced the truly revolutionary idea that it’s the people who own the streets and neighborhoods; the idea that the walls themselves and the surfaces of public transportation mirror the people who live within them and use them.
The Rolling Thunder Writers took hold of New York City’s powerful but decaying infrastructure and transformed it. They proclaimed, “we are here, we will not be ignored.” Those years witnessed the flourishing of a culture of innocent creation and achievement that brightened the destroyed city, turning deferred-maintenance wrecks into brilliant canvases that put a new face on the concept of public ownership. The elegant, proliferating wild-style lettering was in dynamic tension with the grid and called the background to life; a visual metaphor in which the energy of the soul found in the circumstances of life as it is lived.
Click the pics to enlarge.
