Recognize opens this weekend at the Portrait Gallery

Recognize: Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture is opening on Friday at the National Portrait Gallery. Besides featuring rock star artists like Shinique Smith, Kehinde Wiley, Nikki Giovanni, Jefferson Pinder, and David Sheinbaum, my favorite DC graffiti artist Tim Conlon and his writing partner Dave Hupp were commissioned to create pieces for this exhibition. Note: Tim and his crew also wrote the Wreckfest @ Tiffany's installation at the Arlington Arts Center, which visually depicts my Collectors Select statement about art. I'm so proud of these guys! Go to the Arlington Arts Center on a sunny day before March 29 to get the full effect of the installation. And please keep March 28 open on your calendar for a rad closing party at the Center. And go to the Portrait Gallery before October 26 to see Recognize.

Artists' Statement: Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp

While graffiti is many things to many people, for us it comes down to the infusion of color and design to an otherwise blighted and often lifeless setting or surface. We’ve been writing graffiti for over fifteen years: it’s a lifestyle, an addiction, a dysfunctional marriage of secrecy and fame, for better and for worse. Some see it as an insatiable appetite for destruction, but through this abstracted topography we find our creative vision and achieve our self-expression.

In the quest for shameless self-promotion and bravado, graffiti also serves as a therapeutic release from everyday life and personal struggle using a different, obscured identity. This is self-portraiture through a chosen word—your “tag”— and ultimately this tag becomes who you are. In this art of war, where the lines are literally drawn, we compete with rivals, friends, and ourselves in an endless battle to outshine and overcome with the best style, best placement, and most audacity. Every culture glorifies its royalty.

In “RECOGNIZE!” we pay homage to the styles and kings who came before us and to the beats and rhymes that have inspired us, with a nod to the place where it all started.

My statement about Wreckfest @ Tiffany's:

“I found I could say things with colors and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way…things I had no words for.”
Georgia O’Keefe


The Tiffany Gallery’s breathtaking stained glass windows provide a unique and befitting opportunity to illustrate the expressive power of contemporary art. Surprising as it might seem, these early 20th century windows by Louis C. Tiffany, recovered from the Abbey Mausoleum in Arlington National Cemetery, make an ideal backdrop for the bold colors, intricate line details, and witty characters in graffiti created by DC-based artist Tim Conlon and his crew.

By covering the walls of the Tiffany Gallery with New York style graffiti, I hope to provoke questions about how we define and value art. Whether graffiti is mere vandalism or can be considered respectable, enfranchised fine art becomes a poignant question in the context of a public space typically used to exhibit more conventional works—and, occasionally, to provide a setting for wedding receptions and birthday parties.

I raise the question to prompt a conversation and not to impose a viewpoint. However, I am intrigued by the emotional responses that graffiti art can provoke. These responses help define the ways many people view the traditional boundaries of art—limits that must be tested or exceeded to arrive at an expanded idea of what art is.

By taking graffiti out of its standard urban context and placing it in a conventional art venue, I hope to create an unsettling experience for the viewer that underscores the need to acknowledge and value artistic messages in new ways. I invite the viewer to experience a strong emotional interaction with this work—and, through this interaction, to actively clarify her definition of art.

By activating the space in an unexpected way, this installation invites viewers to focus less on the usual objects that we consider art—oil paintings, photographs, and sculptures—and to focus on the underlying ideas and concepts on which artists base their works. The art world is filled with exceeding technical talent, but the artists who capture my attention are the ones who express interesting ideas regardless of the media in which they work.

Art acts as a vital tool for communication, connecting us to our fellow humans now and through time. However, only a small audience can be reached through the traditional spaces of a gallery or a museum. Therefore, graffiti acts as an essential format for transmitting ideas about identity and the artist’s personal philosophy in a more public sphere, to a wider and more diverse audience.

Graffiti that fits this model has been found on ancient Egyptian monuments and was even preserved on walls in Pompeii. Resistance fighters during World War Two spoke out against the Nazi regime by painting their protests on public property. Graffiti is an especially important communication vehicle for those who may feel invisible to announce their presence in the world.