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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Allison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for joining us. Coming up on the show this week, Academy Award winner, Ariana DeBose, will be here. We'll also talk to Zadie Smith about her debut as a playwright, and our April Get Lit with All Of It author, Mona Simpson, will give us a preview of her new novel, Commitment. It's our book club choice this month. Head to wnyc.org/getlit for details, or follow us on Instagram @allofitwnyc for book club updates. All that is in the future, but right now, let's talk about a pioneer in street art.

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Alison Stewart: Let's head back to the Bronx in the early '70s, after the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, on the eve of the birth of hip hop, and on the cusp of a bankrupt New York City, and when teenage artists treated subways like blank canvases. One of those kids was Phase 2, born Michael Lawrence Marrow, who came of age in the NYCHA Forest Housing Development in the South Bronx, and who is widely credited with being a key creator and innovator in the rounded painting and writing style that he did not refer to as graffiti. Phase 2 wouldn't use the G-word. He thought of himself as a writer, as an aerosol artist.

He was part of the creation of hip hop as a B-Boy dancer and poster artist. He was there every step of the way for the rise of a new culture. Phase once said, "I grew up in an atmosphere where we recognized that we were being denied and robbed of knowledge of our culture and knowledge of self, overstanding that I've intensified my natural instinct to look into things even further." A new exhibition at the ACA Galleries on West 20th Street that's called Phase 2 Myth Conception: A Survey 1972-2019, displays some of the work from the over five-decade career of Phase 2, who passed away in 2019. With me now in studio is the show's curator, Mikaela Sardo Lamarche. Hi, Mikaela.

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Seku Grey, Phase 2's nephew and close collaborator. Seku, welcome to the studio as well.

Seku Grey: Thank you. How you doing?

Alison Stewart: Mikaela, when did the interest in creating an exhibition of Phase 2's work, when did that start?

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: The first conversations that we started having were about 2017. This is the culmination of five years of work towards this moment. Phase 2's people reached out to me. I already knew the work and loved it. I had the opportunity to see a show of later work in 2012 called Deep Space, where it was a collaboration that he did with Futura, and Rammellzee, Roberto Matta, and Phase 2. I had the opportunity to see that, and about five years later, I was approached, and here we are today.

Alison Stewart: Seku, as I mentioned in the intro, Phase 2 rejected the G-word. He had very specific ideas about how to talk about art, and then the language around art, and about what he did, that he was a writer. His writing style, he called them softies. Why was language and this vocabulary so important to your uncle?

Seku Grey: I think it's because the perception of language, period. If you look at his art and the evolution of it, he always said to me, it's like, "When someone speaks another language and you don't understand it, but you still understand that it's beautiful." That's the innovation of his art from softies to wild style, or anything that he created, I think language was always important.

Especially when it came with the G-word, it was something that was more demeaned in a negative way. I think it was not coined by the artists, or the people who did it, they were just writers, so it put them in a box, so language is important. It's important for a certain narrative.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a rare interview that exists of Phase 2 from YouTube from a 1989 documentary, in which he's asked about how the culture changed from just writing on a train into being an art form.

Phase 2: That's where I feel that whole so-called graffiti terminology should have been thrown out the window. First of all, we were always called writers. We didn't call ourselves blank, blank, blank artists or anything like that, we just call ourselves writers, which in a sense was totally appropriate because of the fact that it is writing, one way or another. If you started talking about calligraphy, which is different styles of handwriting and writing, more so than not, every borough had their own type of calligraphy.

Brooklyn had theirs, Manhattan had theirs, which was standardized English, and then the Bronx was a derivative of Brooklyn and Manhattan. That's a fact. It's no question about that. If you [unintelligible 00:04:40] sit there and look at all the signatures simultaneously, chronologically, or however you want to look at it, you could see it, which came before and so on and so forth.

Alison Stewart: It's so clear he's thought about this a lot. This is deeply important to him.

Seku Grey: Definitely.

Alison Stewart: The style, the softie, who wants to describe the softie for our audience? You want to try, Seku?

Seku Grey: I think the softie, bubble letters, clouds-- I remember me being young, I was like, "Oh, they look like marshmallows." It's something that was adapted as a font when I was a kid. I'm not even quite sure exactly what he would call it. He probably had a whole nother name for it.

Alison Stewart: The earliest piece in the show is a softie, Mikaela, from 19-- is it '73?

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Yes.

Alison Stewart: It says Phase in these big rounded letters, red trim, blue background. Why is this the centerpiece?

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: We felt that it was so important because the reality is that people know his work, his earliest work, and we thought it was a good place to start because then you could begin the journey. That's the first work in the show, and right across from it is a work from the 1980s, and then we get into the '90s and the 2000s. You see a real progression and a real arc of development. It was so important for us to show the earliest work in conjunction with the later work, so that people could start to understand that progression.

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: I think that piece is really important because it also shows the timing of history of aerosol on canvas. This is before Basquiat on canvas. This is a history that really needs to be known. That piece is historic.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious about, even before that piece, and please correct me if I'm wrong, Phase 2 went to DeWitt Clinton High School, which happened to be across the street from this train storage yard. Is that true?

Seku Grey: Yes, that's true.

Alison Stewart: Do you know why they gravitated towards writing on trains at the time?

Seku Grey: It was the best way to have a canvas. How do you get your art seen on something that travels? The trains will travel to borough to borough and you were able to see signatures, so whoever's was the best, the brightest. When the signature started, before you were writing pieces on a train, it was how many signatures can you get everywhere, so you can be all-city. If you were all-city, that means your name was all around the city. The trains was the best form. It's actually really smart. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: I love the idea of a traveling gallery.

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Absolutely.

Seku Grey: Yes, that was the canvas.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Mikaela Sardo Lamarche and Seku Grey. We're speaking about the new exhibition, Phase 2 Myth Conception: A Survey 1972-2019, it's at the ACA Galleries. It'll be up until June 30th, just opened up. Phase 2's-- his archive's extensive, shall we say, the collection is extensive. It's a beautiful gallery, but you only have so much space.

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: As a curator, what questions were you asking yourself when it came to deciding what pieces to display? We talked a little bit about the order, but when you really thought about, "What do I want to display, and how do I want to display it?"

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: To me, it was really important to show an overview of the work. I wanted to show things that people expected to see, but I also wanted to show a lot of things that people didn't expect to see. Obviously, there are limitations, like you mentioned, about the gallery itself, but it was important to show a multiplicity of media. He worked not only in canvas, he worked in assemblage, he worked in collage, he worked in sculpture, he did fliers that initiated the flier craze, which we haven't even quite gotten to yet. There are so many facets and aspects to him. There was works on paper, drawings, so much that we weren't even able to show it all, but it just is a flavor.

Alison Stewart: There's a piece titled Self-Portrait in the show. Why is that an important piece to the show?

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: For me, it was important to put an image to the work, but moreover, I think it demonstrates his exquisite draftsmanship and technique. Again, that wasn't necessarily visible through some of the canvas paintings. It's reflected in the collages, this fine line, this exquisite line, and this sophistication, and it's really revealed through that piece.

Alison Stewart: There are a lot of drawings and sketches in the show. What is striking to you about the drawing and the sketches?

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Their simplicity, but their directness. The line is just almost unconscious. It's continuous. It's just a total reflection of his feeling, for his heart and in his mind extended through his hand and pen to paper. Even if you don't know anything about the culture or the work that he did before, you walk in and you feel this sense of the person, and the spirit, and the feeling of art. You don't necessarily have to look, you feel it there, and the drawings, in particular, really communicate that for me.

Alison Stewart: Seku, let's talk about your uncle and hip hop. He created his own B-Boy crews. He was also the king of the Hip Hop street flier, as Mikaela mentioned. We can talk about those a little bit more, but let's-- starting with some of those fliers and posters that are on display, what was unique about them for that time?

Seku Grey: For that time, it was only a few people, from what I know, that was doing a lot of flier. It was him and Buddy Esquire, and his was just very distinct, just the line work. I have friends now that are big time graphic designers that's like, "I can't believe he did that." Cutting things out, using protractors, inking to create a flier. The originals, it was really striking. It was something that was way beyond. You see people use it now. Hip Hop Honors awards, Dave Chappelle Block Party used this flier. Didn't even really know about that, but it's cool. It was definitely different.

Alison Stewart: We found a video on YouTube of an original Phase 2 song from the early '80s. This is The Roxy, just to get us in the mood.

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Alison Stewart: He's this incredible multihyphenate, a writer, an artist, a dancer in his own music. How do you think about the relationship between the visual arts and then his artistry as a musician?

Seku Grey: He loved singing more than anything else. Singing and dancing was his thing. The art was something he did. That's just how he just did it because he can do it. It was also for the people too. I don't know. He gave away his art, he gave away styles, he gave away-- he created names for other artists, but the music was very personal. The dance was very personal. That's something that I adopted from him as a dancer. I was a professional dancer myself, multifaceted, I was a stylist, did all the stuff with that. A lot of that came from him and seeing that you can do multiple things well.

Alison Stewart: How aware were you of your uncle's reputation growing up? When did you realize, "Oh, he's Phase 2?"

Seku Grey: That's in middle school . I'm just like, "Oh, this is my uncle," playing basketball in the park. I knew things, part of hip hop, and him and my mom would talk about when they had 1977 Latin Hustle competitions and they were dancing. Until I got a little older and I was getting into hip hop realized like, "Oh, okay, I'm meeting certain people when I'm young. Oh, that's that person. This all makes sense."

Alison Stewart: You started to understand what this was all about. Mikaela, artists like Phase 2 were in this movement, early on, mostly people of color, mostly from uptown Bronx and Harlem. If you can give us a little bit of a history lesson, is how did the downtown art scene-- how did it view aerosol writing and painting at the time?

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Well, I think that there were a lot of galleries, in the East Village in particular, that really embraced it. There was a moment in time in the early '80s where all of the creatives gathered together. That's actually one of the ways that my co-curator, Dave Schmidlapp, and Phase 2 actually met, is that Dave put together this [unintelligible 00:13:49] called IGT, International Graffiti Times and was doing it out of the East Village, and was starting to document all this new phenomenon. Early on, he met Phase, the second issue, he participated and they began their collaboration.

I don't want to say there was a lot of separation. There were certain neighborhoods and stuff, but there was also this moment in time where this spontaneous combustion where all of these disciplines with dance and art and otherwise came together.

Alison Stewart: It was so interesting. I remember the East Village in the '80s. Sorry, I just remember just the cross-pollinization that was going on. It was really interesting. It was exciting because politics were so conservative at the time that all the different groups of people, whether it be from the punks or whether it be from the actors or the hip hop scene, everybody realized we should work together. We shouldn't be siloed.

Seku Grey: I think too, you think about, and I'm a '80s baby, but you think about the '70s and the disco era, and as that era was going down and changing, it was just rumbling in the Bronx that it was too big for the borough and for other boroughs who was-- I think the downtown scene in Manhattan was always the spotlight. If you listen to the song The Roxy, having that song and bringing those parties that was going up in Latin quarter in the Bronx and bringing it downtown was very important. It had a voice. Everybody needed to hear it.

Alison Stewart: It was a special moment. We're talking about Phase 2 Myth Conception: A Survey 1972-2019, which is at the ACA galleries. I'm speaking with curator Mikaela Sardo Lamarche, and Seku Grey, who is an artist as well as a collaborator and the nephew of Phase 2. Can you talk to us a little bit as a collaborator, take your nephew hat off and put collaborator hat on. What was his daily process like? How did he work day to day? Anything you noticed about his creative process that you thought, "Oh, that's really interesting"?

Seku Grey: That's a really good question. His creative process was like, let's watch some kung fu flicks, let's talk to you about music, let's talk about family. He wouldn't really talk about his art at all, but when it came time to do it, we would shop for a lot of random things and odds and ends in thrift stores and he'd write on certain things and do collages and collect magazines.

It was a real random, and it was like he had so many things that he was working on at one time, art-wise. Then I remember in Basel, in the first Basel of Miami, we were just figuring things out, doing a show and doing Wynwood Walls at the same time and saying like, "Hey, let's get this wood, let's do that." He's telling me to do-- it's interesting to see how he worked, just juxtaposition and it's organic too.

I think artistry was in our family, and for me, I'm a Gemini. I'm a master of a lot of different things. I just embrace whatever he was doing and piggyback off of that. He was really technical too. If he was like, "Oh, this needs to be even or symmetrical," he would be real if I'm helping out with a piece or I remember cutting some of the pieces, that's actually an exhibit.

Most of the pieces I help cut half of them. He would just tell me how to do things correctly. These are things I've never done before, but I was able to do it well. He wouldn't let you do it if you can't. He was very particular.

Alison Stewart: Mikaela, I'm going to ask you to put on your curator hat. Explain to me why you think Phase 2's work is modern art, is modern American art.

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Well, I look at this whole genre as the American equivalent to jazz in a way. I think it's really unsung. I think it's been kept very separate out of the mainstream, and only a few have been allowed to cross over. It's been a real underground art for a long, long time, and it's been nourished by itself. I think it is as radical and as important as any of the great movements of the 20th century or 21st century.

The gallery that I work at was founded in 1932. ACA was founded in 1932, as a home for American art and social realism art with a message. A lot of people have said to me like, "Well, how does Phase fit in with that?" The truth is that it is about the transformation of our consciousness and understanding of art and art history. My hope is that this show demonstrates how important he is to that history of American art and American culture, and that he becomes part of the cannon.

Alison Stewart: Let me show you a picture that's on my phone I took, and I want you to explain. I was going to try to explain it. I think it's better if you explain.

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: That is IGT, that is one of the original IGTs with a collage and handwritten style writing on top of it.

Alison Stewart: What is the text? The text looks like it's an interview.

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Yes. A lot of them were interviews and a lot of them were also statements, I would say, about the culture and about the art.

Seku Grey: A lot of revolutionary quotes. There would be things from Black Panthers [unintelligible 00:19:16] it's a lot that they would put into the publications, which was cool. It's like the name of the survey, Myth Conception. We always say it's a myth conception of our culture, so it's like there's a side of our culture that's not really shined and our people don't know the truth of, so the misconception, but there's a myth. It's not true. This is the truth. The G-word is not the truth. This is the truth.

Alison Stewart: Phase 2 passed away after living with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, and he made work up until the end of his life. If you don't mind sharing, what was your uncle thinking about during these last few years of his life, thinking about personally, thinking about creatively, thinking about his legacy?

Seku Grey: That's a loaded question. Unfortunately, I had really, really, really tight relationship with him more than a lot of people in the family. I was fortunate enough to also work side by side, sometimes not by choice, [laughs] he's just like-

Alison Stewart: You will be doing this. [laughs]

Seku Grey: -"Come on, let's do this." I'm like, "I'm doing--" He's like, "Where you been?" I think he was very complex, but also simple at the same time, if that makes sense. He always was about integrity. He taught me that at a young age, about if everybody else is going to sell out, it has to be someone that's going to speak the truth. It's interesting and he--

Years before his illness, he always wanted to-- He said, "I always wanted to hit them with a real [unintelligible 00:20:58]" He wanted to do something really big, of big scale, his narration out to the world. He wanted to do all those things and he was way more aggressive about putting things out or doing work or even telling me to do stuff like video everything, do this, do that. I felt like he can feel it. He always had this interesting thing about death and he would just be like, "Yo man, a lot of friends was passing away." Or he was like, "Look, we've got to do this before time was gone." He was saying it seven years ago. He was an interesting dude about that, but yes.

Alison Stewart: Mikaela, ACA is moving to a new space and--

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Expanding to a new space.

Alison Stewart: Expanding to a new space. So you'll be able to show more work?

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: Tell us a little bit more about that.

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: The new space will be located on the corner of 10th Avenue in 20th Street. We're taking possession imminently, and as we start to move in, we'll start to bring in new works by Phase to have on display. We're also going to be doing a series of events at the space so that every time we do a different event, there'll be additional works to look at. It's an evolving exhibition. Oftentimes you go see a show and you enjoy it, but you never go back again. This is an opportunity to come back several times and visit with it and meditate on it because there is so much to see. Each one of the works really requires some dedicated looking. We're really, really excited about it. Stay tuned for more information.

Alison Stewart: You've got to look at it up close. You've got to look at it from way back, and then you've got to go look at it up close again. [laughs]

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: You see things differently every time. They are ever evolving canvases as well.

Alison Stewart: Phase 2 Myth Conception: A survey 1972-2019 is at the ACA Galleries until June 30th with an expansion in there at some point. My guests have been curator Mikaela Sardo Lamarche and Seku Grey, who is an artist and Phase 2's nephew and collaborator. Thank you so much for coming to the studios.

Mikaela Sardo Lamarche: Thank you.

Seku Grey: Thank You. Appreciate it.

 

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