Jamaica, Queens, New York in the mid 1980s. Rappers, celebrities and hip hop fans came from all over the city to get their own customized T-shirt by the Shirt Kings. The style traveled all over the world through record covers and music videos, and the Shirt Kings designs soon became synonymous with hip hop and the culture of making something out of nothing. Shirt Kings: Pioneers of Hip Hop Fashion looks at the early days of street wear through the lens of the pioneering group of artistic entrepreneurs known as the Shirt Kings. By adapting the graffiti skills from the trains and spray cans to shirts and airbrush they created a new look for a new generation. Edwin PHADE Sacasa is a founding artist of the group and it is through his archives that we are transported to the 1980s in New York City where the fashion was loud, colorful, and filled with cartoon imagery. But not just any cartoon imagery for the cartoons where urbanized. Mickey Mouse with a Fila suit, Casper the Friendly Ghost w
Alain KET Mariduena Bücher


The birthplace of the style writing school of graffiti is New York City. This is the place where young writers first began to transform letters from simple tags on a wall to elaborate masterpieces of colorful and camoflauged letters embellished with characters that depicted friends and heroes alike.By the 1980s the artwork was quickly destroyed by authorities and the artists seeking to preserve some of their works took hold of schoolyards around the city to paint grander works. It was a no-nonsense approach to save their art form and spread their fame to the local kids. The most famous of these schoolyards is located in East Harlem on 106th street and Park Avenue and it became known as the Hall of Fame.At first the Hall of Fame was established to bring together the best artists in the city and have them paint in the same schoolyard supplanting the number 5 train as the showcase place for the best graffiti art in New York. Over the years as the word spread artists from around the city would sneak in and leave their work at night in this unsanctioned museum.From Skeme, Dez, and Daze in the early 1980s to Vulcan, Jon One, and Dome in the late 1980s to Part, Ezo, and TDS rejuvenating the schoolyard with style in the 1990s to TC5 (West, Dash, Psycho, Wane, Cope2, etc.), TDS (Flite, Part, Noc167, Serve, T-Kid170), TATS (Bio, BG183, Nicer, How, Nosm, Sen2) crews tight productions in the 2000s to the writers that travel to New York to paint there today this book documents the exciting art work that was created in a small obscure school in Harlem that became known as the legendary Hall of Fame. Join us on this artistic retrospective of the famous and important New York landmark.