“A bait-and-switch trick”

“An exhibition entitled Graffiti immediately evokes an attempt to somehow legitimize graffiti within the art system. We have all seen exhibitions like this […] with a title that is a bit of a bait-and-switch trick,” writes Ned Vena, who co-curated the Graffiti exhibition with Leonie Radine. In this contribution for Museion Bulletin, he tells us how the idea for the exhibition in Museion came about. It all started with a small exhibition in a New York project space in the summer of 2022, when Klara Lidén’s sculptures were carried on foot across East Broadway…

The exhibition is titled Graffiti. This is the second iteration of the show. The first show, entitled “Graffiti,” was at Public Access gallery on Henry Street in lower Manhattan. The show opened on a Thursday night in late July in 2022.

Public Access was a tiny, tiny gallery run by my friend Leo Fitzpatrick. Leo is an actor and is best known for his portrayal of Telly in Larry Clark’s 1995 film “Kids.” Leo has had many gigs in film and television since his debut in “Kids,” but he has also been a staple of the so-called downtown NYC art world for nearly as long. He has run several project spaces and galleries; he has curated many shows. He worked collaboratively with artists such as Nate Lowman, Josh Smith and Dash Snow, to whom he was also a subject. Leo has written extensively about artists. Additionally, he published “Just Born Dead,” a collection of poetry and journal entries with Karma Books in 2012. In January of 2025, Leo opened a show he curated titled “Larry Clark 92-95” at Ruttkowski;68 Gallery on Cortland Alley in Manhattan. This show was a reprieve of a Luhring Augustine gallery show of Clark’s from 1996. The photos are mostly of skateboarders at the “Brooklyn Banks,” many of which feature Leo. Clark discovered Leo, a native of nearby New Jersey, skating at the Banks and cast him in “Kids.” Before acting and art, Leo had skateboarding. Leo has managed to maintain a vital, personal and highly active relationship to all the people, places, interests and activities of his life, and has produced a unique and distinctly New York body of work in tandem with these subjects.

Leo and I are professional colleagues, we share an office. We don’t work in the art world, but we speak about art often and keep each other updated on shows. He asked me to curate something at Public Access at a moment when I was somewhat unsure of my relationship to the artworld. I had also never curated a show before and was not entirely sure I that was interested in doing that. I could not resolve a concept to focus on, everything seemed too labored, contrived or slightly beyond my understanding to have a defined perspective on.

Also in 2022, I had taken a step back from making studio art. I have a full-time job. Studios are expensive, NYC is expensive. I hadn’t sold an artwork in years. I hadn’t had a solo show in almost as long. I had lost the plot of how to be a professional artist, whatever that means. I relied on graffiti to release my creative energy. Like skateboarding for Leo, graffiti had been there for me before art. It remained steadfast and friendly to me in art’s absence.

I realized that Leo’s proposal was an opportunity to address both graffiti and art. “Graffiti,” as it appeared in 2022, is a prototype of the exhibition at Museion. The show included 15 artists, 13 of which are on view in the show at Museion. I had to rely on the goodwill and trust of friends and galleries to make the show happen. The show featured site-specific spray painted works alongside historical artists such as Rammellzee. We showed Chantal Akerman’s “News from Home” on a television without permission from her estate. Maggie Lee finished her collage the night before the opening on the gallery floor, and I walked Klara Lidén’s sculpture from Reena Spaulings down the street. We were able to scrape it together and the concept of “Graffiti” was made into an exhibition.

The title of the show was and remains one of the most vital aspects of it. An art show titled Graffiti calls to mind a practice of exhibition making which attempts to validate graffiti in some way. We’ve all seen these shows. They can be a bit cheesy. As much as I love the work that is exhibited, graffiti remains sequestered from the type of thinking and looking that I had experienced in my thinking about and looking at contemporary art. I wanted to not only relinquish graffiti from this sanction, but also engage the way that it has been exhibited, that cheesiness. Graffiti as a title for the exhibition was a bait-and-switch trick. It was in a sense, an art show about graffiti, not the other way around. It drew a crowd.

Graffiti at Museion is the same show, only much, much larger. Working with Leonie Radine, we were able to graduate the initial show from its scrappiness into the first museum show of its kind. The concept remains intact. Graffiti treats graffiti as subject matter, how any other art can have subject matter. There are points of contact between graffiti and more conventional contemporary art that are harmonious, but difficult to articulate. At Museion, and for the first time, Carol Rama hangs on a wall next to Blade, Jutta Koether hangs next to Wanto. Leonie is a curator and an art historian. I am a graffiti writer and an artist. This show is only possible as the result of the combining of these different backgrounds and approaches. Graffiti is about creating new and unexpected connections and I believe that begins with our collaboration in the curating of the show.

Ned Vena (1982, Boston, USA) is a New York-based artist and archivist. His artistic practice, which includes paintings, sculpture, installations and film, has been deeply influenced by his active experience as a graffiti writer and his deep research into the history of graffiti; on the other hand, his careful studies of the history of painting have shaped his understanding of graffiti. Both his personal passion and his interdisciplinary archival knowledge are manifested in the exhibition.

About the exhibition

The first museum exhibition in Italy to investigate the art history of spray paint, Graffiti focuses on how the visual vernacular of the city and the street has entered the studio. Above all, the show contends that graffiti is a way of seeing and experiencing urban landscapes.

Until September 14th