In 1979, while she was still a high school student, Lady Pink began writing graffiti and creating expansive murals on subway trains and industrial buildings in New York City. Her work often incorporates vivid renderings of feminine figures, brilliant colors, references to the subway cars on which she traveled and painted—and, always, the letters “PINK.”

Lady Pink’s crew named her Pink because she was one of the only graffiti writers on the scene at the time who was a woman—while she herself notes, “I titled myself Lady Pink because we were royalty.”^[1] She reflects, “I was a feminist before I even knew what the word was. … A lot of those female themes are in my work because early on I could see we haven’t reached equality.”^[2] She eventually founded the all-women graffiti crew, Ladies of the Arts.

During the late 1970s and the 1980s, the growing graffiti subculture in New York was the target of increased police surveillance and security, making Lady Pink’s successful missions to tag hard-to-access sites even more challenging and impressive. At the same time, graffiti artists’ renown grew within popular culture and the art world. In 1982, Lady Pink was featured in the film Wild Style, a fictionalized chronicle of the scene, also starring famed graffiti artists Fab 5 Freddy and Lee Quiñones. A year earlier, all three artists were part of the legendary New York/New Wave exhibition (MoMA P.S.1, New York) alongside artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sarah Charlesworth, Keith Haring, Maripol, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Lady Pink x Jenny Holzer
B6: The Robert W. Wilson Building, Fl 3
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, both Lady Pink and Jenny Holzer infiltrated public spaces in New York with their respective artworks: Lady Pink created large-scale graffiti murals, while Holzer anonymously pasted posters and applied stickers bearing thought-provoking texts. After meeting circa 1982, the artists collaborated on a series of paintings combining text by Holzer and imagery by Lady Pink. They have reunited for a new project at MASS MoCA. Much as Holzer’s Truisms and Inflammatory Essays represent a variety of perspectives and philosophies, the images in Lady Pink’s mural—from memento mori to characters rendered in a style reminiscent of mid-century comic books—reference a range of artistic idioms and histories.

Collaborative paintings by Holzer and Lady Pink have been shown at Tate Modern (London), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), and the Albertina Modern (Vienna), and feature in public collections such as Museum of Modern Art (New York), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee), and Ludwig Museum (Budapest).

Lady Pink x ROOTS Teen Center
51 Ashland St., North Adams, MA
During the month (July 2022), Lady Pink is holding a series of workshops with local teens to design and install two new murals at the ROOTS Teen Center in downtown North Adams. ROOTS offers a safe, supervised space for teens to explore their community, develop their talents and skills, and have their voices heard. These murals—on view long-term on the exterior of ROOTS—visualize ideas and topics important to these young artists and creators.

This project is a collaboration between Lady Pink, ROOTS Teen Center, and MASS MoCA.

About the Artist
Lady Pink was born in Ecuador and raised in New York City. Her graffiti writing and murals have been seen in public spaces in cities including New York and Minneapolis. Her paintings are also in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; MoMA, New York; the Groninger Museum, Groningen, the Netherlands, and numerous other museums. Today, alongside continuing to create paintings, Lady Pink shares her years of experience with young people by holding mural workshops and lecturing to college students around the world. She resides in the countryside north of New York City.

[1] Sarah Cascone interviewing Lady Pink, “‘I Was a Feminist and I Didn’t Know It’: How Lady Pink Made a Space for Herself in the Boys Club of New York’s Graffiti Scene,” Artnet, July 18, 2019.
[2] Ibid

Jenny Holzer, DON’T SHOOT CIVILIANS, (in collaboration with Lady Pink), 1983
Spray paint on canvas
112 x 120 in. / 284.5 x 304.8 cm
Text: Survival, 1983–85
© 1983 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY