MCA Chicago Talk Featuring Lee Quinones, Dao-Yi Chow, and Romi Crawford Takes Place on November 12, 2024
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) will present a talk with street art luminary Lee Quinones and his recent collaborator, Creative Director of New Era and streetwear designer Dao-Yi Chow, for the Chicago launch of Quinones’s monograph, “Lee Quinones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond.” The event, moderated by Chicago-based art historian Romi Crawford, will take place on November 12, 2024, at 6:00 p.m. in Edlis Neeson Theater.
Lee Quinones is considered the single most influential artist to emerge from the New York City subway art movement. He is a celebrated figure in both the contemporary art world and in popular culture circles, faithfully producing work that is ripe with provocative socio-political content and intricate composition. Quiñones was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, in 1960, and raised in New York City’s Lower East Side. One of the originators of street art, Lee started painting on New York City’s streets and subway cars in 1974 and was instrumental in moving street art above the ground when he created the first handball court mural in 1978. Over the next decade he would paint more than 125 whole subway cars throughout the MTA system before shifting to a studio-based practice.
Dao-Yi Chow is an American fashion designer and a lifelong New York City resident. After attending the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in downtown Manhattan, Chow studied communications and graduated from New York University. Chow’s professional career started in the late nineties, helping his friend and mentor Robert “Bobbito” Garcia open the seminal East Village boutique Footwork. He quickly went on to work at venerable streetwear brands Mecca and Ecko, as well as contribute to such notable publications as Ego Trip, The Source, Vibe, and Blaze magazines as a music journalist correspondent.
Romi Crawford, PhD, has a research practice that explores race and ethnicity as they relate to American visual culture including art, film, and photography, as well as the logics of artistic inheritance through forms of sociality, archives, pedagogies, and intergenerational collaboration. Recent curatorial projects include Citing Black Geographies (Richard Gray Gallery, 2022) and So Be It! Ase!: Photographic Echoes of Festac’77 (Richard Gray, 2023).
After the event, there will be a special meet and greet with Quinones where he will sign his monograph as well as products from an MCA-exclusive collaboration. If you are unable to attend the talk but would like to purchase a signed monograph, a limited number will be available online. To purchase tickets, please visit the event ticketing page at experience.mcachicago.org
For information about MCA’s exhibitions, programs, and special events at mcachicago.org or at 312.280.2660.
