User:Nighttimenicholas/sandbox

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Chris Pape (aka Freedom) is an American journalist, painter, and graffiti artist. Pape is best known for his numerous paintings in the eponymous Freedom Tunnel, an Amtrak tunnel running underneath Manhattan's Riverside Park located between West 72nd and West 122nd Streets.

History[edit]

Pape grew up on West 94th Street and Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, New York,[1] and began tagging subway tunnels and subway cars in 1974 under the moniker "Gen II" at the age of 14.[2] He quit writing graffiti upon entering high school [3] at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art [2] and by 1977 had ran away from home and dropped out of school.[2]

Pape was first introduced to the Riverside Park tunnel at age 14 by his older brother Vince. [4] In 1979, the graffiti crew The Soul Artist's began to make a comeback. This is when he changed his graffiti name from Gen II to Freedom, inspired by the Peace and Freedom Party.[1][2] Pape returned to the tunnel when he was 20 and began making it his personal gallery between 1980 and 1996.[2][4][5]

Some notable works in the tunnel attributed to Pape include a recreation of the Mona Lisa;[6] Pape's self-portrait titled Down by Law, which features a male torso with a spray-can head [1]; "There's No Way Like the American Way" (aka "The Coca-Cola Mural"), a parody of Coca-Cola advertising and tribute to the evicted homeless of the tunnel; a portrait of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, titled "Broken Idols; a Ted Williams baseball card; Salvador Dali's melting clocks, and the Venus de Milo flirting with a headless version of Michelangelo's David. [1]

In 1992, Pape and fellow graffiti artist Smith from Sane Smith created a collaborative mural titled “Third of May”, an interpretation of Francisco Goya's famous anti-war painting titled The Third of May 1808.[7] Pape and Smith's portrait depicts the stylized plight of the tunnel-dwelling homeless circa 1992 when the tunnel was reopened in 1991 for Amtrak Empire Connection trains.[8] It was Smith who dubbed the Riverside tunnel the Freedom Tunnel after Pape and it has been famously known as this ever since. [2]

The murals became an integral part in the lives of the homeless living in the tunnel, some had even assisted Pape in painting some of the murals. [4] Bernard Isaac, the self proclaimed Lord of the Tunnel, states that "Chris' works mean a lot to us down here," and notes that the homeless kept other vandals from defacing the murals. [4]

Another notable work of Pape's outside of the tunnel is a black and silver recreation of Michelangelo's iconic hands painted in the Sistine Chapel from The Creation of Adam. It was painted on a full train car running on the No. 1 line in 1983. In 1990, the Museum of Modern Art included a photograph of the train in a sixty-page catalog for an exhibit titled "High and Low: Modern Art of Popular Culture", though in the end the museum chose not to display the image for “fear it would alienate trustees and donors who might interpret it as an endorsement of graffiti.”[9]

Pape notes that he has been stylistically influenced by James Rosenquist, while has been “spiritually” influenced by artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. [3]

Pape later received a degree in visual journalism from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan [5] and co-authored a visual biography of his childhood hero, American graffiti artist Wayne Roberts writing under the named Stay High 149. [4][10]

Sources[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Anemona, Hartocollins (21 May 1992). "TUNNEL VISION Chris Pape spray-paints his murals in the West Side Amtrak tunnel, amid a small colony of homeless people. One of them, Bernard Isaac, acts as the curator of Pape's gallery/studio". Newsday, Combined Editions.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  2. ^ a b c d e f http://www.subwayoutlaws.com/Interviews/FREEDOM/freedom.htm
  3. ^ a b http://missrosen.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/piecebook-reloaded-the-chris-pape-interview
  4. ^ a b c d e http://articles.latimes.com/1990-10-10/entertainment/ca-1825_1_chris-pape
  5. ^ a b http://blog.vandalog.com/2011/09/the-chris-pape-aka-freedom-interview
  6. ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E4D7113CF93BA2575AC0A9679D8B63
  7. ^ http://walk.allcitynewyork.com/2009/02/riverside-tunnel-2009.html
  8. ^ http://citynoise.org/article/8210
  9. ^ http://popupcity.net/2009/07/chris-papes-freedom-tunnel/
  10. ^ http://www.gingkopress.com/05-str/stay-high-149.html

External links[edit]


Category:American graffiti artists Category:Living people


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