Museum Collections

Artist and teacher Jack Stewart (1926-2005) began studying and photographing subway graffiti in the late 1960s and became one of the first art historians to consider graffiti as a true American art form. Beginning in 1973 and continuing until the mid-1980s, he gathered many well-known graffiti writers in his East Village studio on Saturday afternoons to view slides of the subway graffiti he had documented that week. Realizing the irrepressible urge of many of these young artists to "tag" any surface in sight, he allowed them to tag the inside of the door to his lavatory with the understanding that they could not tag his paintings or other surfaces in his studio. They agreed, and began to create this remarkable artifact of New York subway graffiti. This now famous object, a standard metal clad tenement hall door, has over 190 tags by more than 80 graffiti writers.