Book Review: ‘Rammellzee,’ edited by Maxwell Wolf and Jeff Mao
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In the mid-1970s, a half-Black, half-Italian teenager from the projects in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens started hitting the A train with a spray can. At 18, he legally changed his name to Rammellzee, and since then no conversation about graffiti culture or the late-20th-century New York art scene has been complete without mentioning his influence.
In RAMMELLZEE: Racing for Thunder (Rizzoli, $65), the first major monograph on the multi-hyphenate artist, who died in 2010, the co-editors Maxwell Wolf and Jeff Mao intersperse more than a half-century’s worth of art, photos and archives with an oral history as told by the fellow artists, friends and family who knew him best.
Rammellzee spray-paints the Berlin Wall in 1983, on the occasion of his solo exhibition “Gothic Futurism.”via Silvia Menzel and Rizzoli
“Untitled (Bands of Steel),” painted in acrylic and spray paint on carpet, circa 1985.via the Estate of Rammellzee and Rizzoli
“In the Middle of Robbin the Bank the Dam Yard Bizzard Hits Us,” 1983.via D.E.F Collection, Paris and Rizzoli
As a teenager Rammellzee conceived his theory of Gothic Futurism, which saw language as a “tool of oppression” and graffiti writers as heroes in a fight to liberate the world...
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