‘A train nearly took my head off': how Lady Pink shook up the macho men of New York's graffiti scene

The Guardian

5 days ago

Lady Pink was five when she killed her first snake – with her bare feet. 'That shows what a precocious and fearless kid I was,' says the 61-year-old. Even over the phone from upstate New York, the venerated graffiti artist is a force to be reckoned with, talking at a breakneck tempo punctuated by bursts of raucous laughter. There's a sense that this energy might quickly combust too – she admits she 'totally lost it' while preparing for her current solo show, Miss Subway NYC, at D'Stassi Art in London.
The exhibition sees her vividly recreate a New York City subway station. There are paintings in eye-popping colours depicting trains, train yards and playful portraits of the characters you typically see there: a busker in a cat costume, an elderly lady with a shopping cart and a chihuahua. With the help of her husband, fellow graffiti artist Smith, she has even meticulously reproduced layers of tags on the walls from her halcyon days, when she would risk arrest – and sometimes her life – to spray across the city at night. On the show's opening night, more than 1,000 people showed up to pay their respects to the grande dame of graf.
Lady Pink was born Sandra Fabara in Ambato, Ecuador, in 1964. Her story begins on her grandparents' sugarcane plantation in the Amazon rainforest – a vast, wild terrain that, like the snake who met its fate at her feet, didn't intimidate her. Her mother had returned after leaving Pink's father, an agricultural engineer who was a 'womaniser, gambler, cheater … '. As soon as she had enough money, when Pink was seven, they left Ecuador for New York City. 'When we came here, we had no papers, we didn't speak the language.'
Pink was a self-assured, determined and talented kid who quickly learned how to channel her pain and grief into creativity. She first got into graffiti at 15, after her boyfriend was arrested for tagging and sent to live with relatives in Puerto Rico. 'I cried for a whole month, then I started tagging his name everywhere.' A painting in her London show of the artist as a teen kissing a handsome boy pays tribute to this defining moment in her personal history.
When she started high school in Queens, she met 'kids who knew how to get into yards and tunnels. The more they said, 'You can't, you're a girl,' the more I had to prove them wrong. I was stubborn as a mule. I was crazy.' As one of the only women accepted by the notoriously macho graffiti scene in New York in the late 1970s, she quickly gained a reputation for tagging subway trains. 'We are like a guild, a clannish, tribal group who go out at night and watch each other's backs.'
She later earned her official moniker 'Pink' from a fellow member of TC5 crew, Seen. 'I was the only female in the city painting, and I needed a female name so everyone would know our crew tolerated a female,' she explains. 'I knew I was the token female and that got my foot in the door – but to keep up with the big bad boys, I had to back it up with real talent too. There was sexism of course, but I'm a little bit of a badass. I don't appreciate being walked over and I stand up strongly for myself. Even if I'm petite, I'm loud. Don't judge me by my size, judge me by how big and fast I paint!'
She added the 'Lady' title – at first inspired by the European nobility in the historical romance novels she was reading. 'But I don't write Lady – I'm terrible at the letter Y.' Later she used the Lady title to avoid confusion with the pop singer of the same name – who approached the artist to design her first album cover. 'I said, 'Hell no!' Are you kidding me? But she's a fan, I'm not going to say anything bad about her, she's fine, she sings fine.'
As a young woman out at night in New York's most insalubrious neighbourhoods in 1979, Pink was especially vulnerable. 'I would dress like a boy and pretend to be a boy. The teens I ran with weren't much bigger than me and I knew they weren't there to protect me if shit went down. You're in the worst neighbourhoods of New York City relying on the kindness of strangers to save your life – you've got to be prepared. What happens in the dark alleys of cities, you don't want to know. You shake a spray can and hope they let you live.'
'Bombing' subway trains is one of the most perilous activities of graffiti – 'loads of kids have died doing it, getting run over by the trains or electrocuted. It still happens. It's live electricity: if you touch the rail you will die.' How did she survive? 'You don't stumble in like you're drunk, it's like a military manoeuvre. You know the train schedules, where to walk, where to hide. You have all of that figured out ahead of time. You need to be sure where you're going when you're running like panicked rats in the dark maze.'
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Still, there were more than a few close calls over the years. She recalls she once sliced her finger open and 'it was bleeding badly, it was a terrible cut and I probably should have had it stitched, but I just stuck it in my pocket and it quietly bled in there. I didn't want people to say: 'Oh you're a girl you're hurt and crying, you're going to slow us down,' – you've got to be a good soldier.'
Another time, there was a near miss with an unforeseen moving train. 'I had gone to pee and I thought I could just walk it,' she laughs. 'Then there was a train coming and it was doing a weird curve, slanting into the wall. At the last minute I ducked, but if I had stayed standing the train would've taken my head off. After that, I just ran at top speed. I can't believe I survived it.'
The 1980s were a whirlwind. She rose to fame in 1983 after featuring in Wild Style, the cult film that launched American hip-hop culture globally. Her spray-painted canvases, horror vacui compositions with bold, attention-grabbing colours of scenes inspired by the street, began to be accepted in conventional, legal art spaces, and in 1984 she was included in MoMA PS1's The New Portrait alongside Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. 'No one was aware it was going to launch anything, we were just in it for the moment and the money. People told us the art market was fickle and eventually we'd have to get jobs.'
Once she invited Haring to come to paint a train with her. 'Just me and him, no machismo – but dude was not down, he didn't want to cross the line of breaking laws. What he did was chalk on boards. He was a white dude; he wasn't incurring any kind of arrests. They weren't graffiti artists, but they were the original street artists. Graffiti artists work with spray, with fonts – and we hit stuff with wheels.'
Pink also received an invitation from Jenny Holzer, who was wheatpasting her Truisms posters in Manhattan. 'We were like the only women going out at night doing things. She was a tall lady, like two metres, she would wear a hoodie and a big coat so she could pass off as a man going around at night alone. I am very small and I couldn't pass off like that, so I had to run with a crew. She reached out to me and suggested we collaborate.'
Holzer had done up an entire building in the Lower East Side. 'It was wild out there at that time, there were a lot of people doing drugs, there was a lot of crime. But she made this beautiful, safe building, and I loved going there and working with her.' Holzer would prep three-metre-square canvases for Lady Pink to spray paint her images on, and Holzer paired them with text. The works were later shown at MoMA and Tate Modern. In 1983, 19-year-old Pink was photographed by Lisa Kahane wearing a vest emblazoned with Holzer's famous words: 'Abuse of power comes as no surprise' – in 2017 the photo went viral as an emblem of the #MeToo movement.
Though artwork sales and interest did wane in the late 1980s, Pink pivoted. She set up a mural company with her husband, doing public commissions and working in communities. While many of her peers 'couldn't handle the business, they couldn't leave the ghetto behind, they couldn't show up on time or answer a phone call', she says she was able to 'adapt to polite society. Artists don't know how to hustle, and you've gotta hustle, hustle, hustle. Some don't have the cojones. But good grief, you've got to go knocking on doors!'
She stopped illegally painting subway trains decades ago – 'now I save my crazy for the galleries' – but the spirit of the subway lives on in the London show. And she says she's still paying the price for her years of youthful rebellion. Twelve years ago, she and her husband moved upstate after 'one too many' police raids on their home in NYC. 'They took my stuff – including my husband – and messed with us. We had to spend money on an expensive attorney. They've told me to stick to the indoor stuff and not paint big old murals because they inspire people. I said yeah – community people, poets, artists, I should hope I inspire people!'
One thing is for sure: she doesn't have any regrets. 'Street art is the biggest art movement, we are in every corner of the world. By whatever means possible, we are taking over this world, it's our whole plan! I think it's cool, man – you've got to take control of your environment. You don't need an MA to be an artist, you just need a little paint plus a little courage. Just do it!'
Lady Pink: Miss Subway NYC is at D'Stassi Art, London, until late September.