In 1994, five years before his death, the Museum of the City of New York was gifted with Martin Wong's extensive graffiti collection, which features over 300 objects from 50 different graffiti artists of the 1970s and '80s. And you've definitely heard of some of them—according to the museum, the collection includes "the earliest surviving examples of work by artists who went on to have important careers in the arts, fashion, and music industries, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christopher 'Daze' Ellis, FUTURA 2000, Keith Haring LA II, LADY PINK, and Lee Quiñones."
The exhibit was curated by the museum's Sean Corcoran, who told Art In America, "[Wong] could have sold off the collection piecemeal, and there were interested European buyers, but he felt strongly that the collection should remain in New York, and he donated it wholesale to the museum. Wong was interested in far more than collecting the artists' works, since he became a mentor to several of them. He often traded work with them, sometimes selling one of his own paintings and turning around and spending all the money buying work from graffiti artists."
Wong, along with Peter Broda, briefly ran the Museum of American Graffiti on Bond Street in the East Village in 1989 in an effort to preserve the art form, but when Wong was diagnosed with AIDS he gave the collection to the MCNY. Starting February 4th, they'll be on view there for the first time—click through for a preview.
For more on the history of graffiti, and some of what you'll see at this exhibition, check out The History of American Graffiti: From Subway Car to Gallery on PBS:
And of course, where there were spray cans, there was the Vandal Squad:
