Pioneering graffiti artist Futura 2000: ‘It’s been very improbable, my career’

Multimedia artist Futura 2000’s new career retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts has been decades in the making – and has only come about due to years of intense perseverance. While Futura has reached the heights of his chosen medium, now boasting high-level collaborations with the likes of Virgil Abloh, Uniqlo and Nike, he spent years struggling to break into the art world and build a name for himself. His exhibition, Breaking Out, represents a new milestone and an achievement of validation from the New York art world that has long proved elusive to him. The artist first began creating work in the early 1970s as a part of the graffiti scene that was flourishing in his home borough of Brooklyn. From the beginning, Futura’s work stood out for its abstraction and sci-fi themes, which the artist has credited to the black and white TV shows and B-movies that he watched as a child and young adult in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The Stanley Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey was a major touchstone that got the artist thinking about space and the future, and he also found inspiration in 1979’s franchise-starter Alien, particularly in how the...