Graffiti, vogueing, hip-hop and counterculture: it was the Big Apple in the 70s and 80s, and some of the US’s biggest artists were at the centre
When the Big Apple was at its most rotten during the economic decline of the 70s and 80s, a new generation of artists pushed through the cracks of the busted footpaths in the city’s most neglected suburbs. Ignored by the minimalist Soho galleries and academic art critics, they staked their ground by tagging subway trains and crumbling tenements.
Some, like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria this month, had the wiles to barge their way into the mainstream without appointment or anointment. Equally vital to the era’s enduring influence was Colab, a renegade collective of activist artists in whose orbit Basquiat floated; the so-called Downtown 500 of artists and musicians who crossed paths at the Mudd Club, CBGB and Club 57; and early tastemakers such as Fab 5 Freddy, an artist and filmmaker who could see the burgeoning scenes of graffiti, rapping and breakdancing as forming a larger cultural movement that would eventually become a global phenomenon.
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