Uptown & Downtown

New York graffiti writers who cut their teeth painting trains in the ’70s and ’80s transfer Old Skool street art to a more permanent, collectible medium in this book, using transit maps, instead of subway cars, as canvases.

GHOST, T-KID, QUIK, REVOLT, BLADE, SHAME125, COPE2, SKEME, and others decorated ordinary 23″ × 32″ MTA maps with their personal tags and graphics—echoing the heyday of New York train graffiti. Sixteen sections, one for each writer, feature a total of more than 100 maps, as well as brief statements about the painters’ artistic evolution and style.

Like a dynamic « piece book, » or sketchbook, this collection is an exclusive sampling of the painters’ signature strokes and tags in portable form. In fact, many of the artists featured here have used subway-map art as a springboard from the fleeting genre of train-tagging to the sturdier platform of the international art gallery circuit.