{"id":203164,"date":"2026-04-20T11:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T11:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/203164\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T11:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T11:18:09","slug":"lee-quinoness-renegade-80s-art-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/203164\/","title":{"rendered":"Lee Qui\u00f1ones\u2019s Renegade \u201980s Art World"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n Qui\u00f1ones on the set of the \u201cRapture\u201d music video.
\n Photo: Charlie Ahearn\n <\/p>\n

In 1980, Lee Qui\u00f1ones was 20 years old and had already become, to anyone who rode the subway, a household name. On 4, 5, J, M, and R trains, LEE was graffitied across whole cars in giant blocks of text, the letters sometimes cracked or slumped and molded into barely recognizable shapes. Qui\u00f1ones often took inspiration from cartoons and comic books, painting dragons or, most famously, Howard the Duck. He and his art collective, the Fabulous Five, used graffiti as a kind of dialogue with the city, parts of which believed their work was, as Mayor Ed Koch put it, \u201cdestroying our lifestyle.\u201d WHAT IS GRAFFITI ART? they wrote on one car. TAKE A LOOK FOR YOURSELF.<\/p>\n

City leadership did not respond in kind. \u201cIf I had my way, I wouldn\u2019t put in dogs but wolves,\u201d Koch said in 1980 when asked about how the city would crack down on graffiti artists. A year later, his administration actually did build high barbed-wire fences and stationed German shepherds around a Queens train yard. Then the MTA launched a pilot program that was referred to as the \u201cGreat White Fleet,\u201d painting roughly a dozen 7 trains completely white, apparently in hopes that it would discourage vandalism. \u201cCan you believe that?\u201d Qui\u00f1ones says. \u201cThey actually created a canvas.\u201d (The program was promptly discontinued.)<\/p>\n

My Lost Art World<\/p>\n


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Qui\u00f1ones knew he would eventually have to move on from subway art, and throughout the early \u201980s, he steadily brought more of his work aboveground. He painted murals on walls across handball courts in lower Manhattan, experimenting with shading and depth of field. \u201cPeople were making pilgrimages to those walls,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI don\u2019t even know how that happened.\u201d One of those people was the graffiti artist Fab 5 Freddy, who later became a kind of godfather of downtown and a pivotal figure in the \u201990s hip-hop scene. He sought out Qui\u00f1ones while he was sitting in a classroom, still trying to earn his GED after flunking out of high school. \u201cHe walked in and said very formally, \u2018I want to talk to that gentleman,\u2019\u201d Qui\u00f1ones says. \u201cI thought he was a cop.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fab 5 Freddy \u2014 confusingly not one of the original members of the Fabulous Five \u2014 became one of Qui\u00f1ones\u2019s biggest collaborators. At parties and art shows held mostly in \u201cabandoned facilities,\u201d Qui\u00f1ones says, they met the variously mythologized artists who came to define the era \u2014 figures like Debbie Harry, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. As a group, their aesthetic was defined in large part by the flashy, unabashed visual style of graffiti \u2014 so much so that Blondie commissioned Qui\u00f1ones, Fab 5 Freddy, and Basquiat to create the set for two music videos, with Qui\u00f1ones detonating paint onto the walls and Basquiat scribbling words onto the edges.<\/p>\n

Major gallerists and curators eventually became curious about this irrepressibly cool little underworld. One of the first big shows spotlighting graffiti art, \u201cNew York\/New Wave\u201d at MoMA PS1, drew massive crowds from every corner of the scene. Barbara Gladstone asked to represent Qui\u00f1ones shortly thereafter, walking into the pet shop where he worked at the time, arm in arm with gallery director Allan Schwartzman. When, in the late \u201980s, Qui\u00f1ones\u2019s world seemed to suddenly fall apart \u2014 the art market collapsed, and the AIDS epidemic ravaged his downtown orbit \u2014 he channeled much of that into his work, creating murals like The Golden Child as an homage to his friend Haring.<\/p>\n

Today, he paints mostly on canvas, but he kept creating murals into the early 2010s. In one, Requiem, he painted a full-scale medevac helicopter emerging from a vibrant, coiled jungle on the side of a building on the Lower East Side. \u201cPeople to this day ask me, \u2018How\u2019d you do that, Lee?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cAnd the answer is always \u2018Subways.\u2019 They taught me three things: how to work with little or no light; composition, knowing how to work with all sides of a car; and timing \u2014 Be in and out by a certain time.\u201d \u2014 Paula Aceves<\/p>\n

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\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the April 20, 2026, issue of
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\n New York Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Qui\u00f1ones on the set of the \u201cRapture\u201d music video. Photo: Charlie Ahearn In 1980, Lee Qui\u00f1ones was 20…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203165,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[1149,5463,17,9,24,2409,63,122,124,123,80397,80394,80395,80396],"class_list":{"0":"post-203164","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-cityscape","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-new-york-magazine","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-queens","16":"tag-queens-headlines","17":"tag-queens-news","18":"tag-street-art","19":"tag-the-art-issue","20":"tag-the-art-issue-2026","21":"tag-the-yesteryear-issue"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}