Are you still there? No. I was there till my wife got pregnant and the 5th floor walk up wasn't happening anymore. I moved to the West Village and never looked back.

Were you doing graffiti when you first moved to NYC? When I first moved to New York I sat on my hands for the first year and just watched. I rode my bike around, rode the train around; tried to see as much as I could and not get involved in graffiti. I wanted to know the lay of the land before I got started, and that was really smart.

One guy I wrote with was a washed up graffiti writer that nobody had anything good to say about, this guy Revs. He loved that he was an outcast. He was doing this really unconventional looking graffiti and people hated it, but I loved it. I thought he was really interesting and had great ideas. I moved to New York to meet guys like Revs and hangout with guys like Revs.

New York natives are a breed apart. They know everything but they're not jaded about it. They're wise but they're not dicks about it, most of the time. Revs was that perfect distillation of New York City. So original and so off on his own path. It was really fun to work with him. For the first year, virtually the only graffiti I painted was with him.

I started writing more and more soon after that self imposed quiet time. I was really busy publishing a magazine. But everytime I would put an issue to bed, I'd go out and paint a little bit. The magazine finally went under sometime in '98. That was it. I started really writing graffiti from that point on.

As if to make up for lost time, from the beginning of '97 or '98 to 2001, all I did was write graffiti as like, a 29 and a 30 year old. Way too old. Old enough to know better. But it was something I knew how to do, I didn't know what else to do, and it kept me busy.

I actually have one of your pieces in my blackbook from my eighth birthday. Awesome! I'm always available for birthday blackbooks. Let me know.

What made you get into murals? Murals for me were always part of the game. I did a fair amount of basic, ugly, and not so ugly graffiti. I love tags and love every potential style of graffiti. But I always had this high minded idea of, "Oh, I want to be an artist and do artistic things." I had the ambition and I had the capability and sometimes it all worked out and I actually did something that was big and beautiful. Most of the time I felt I did my best stuff with a pen or one can of paint.

I was painting graffiti that looked like signs. I was really interested in making graffiti that at first glance you might think is advertising. I got caught up in the whole notion of graffiti being a brand and a name and a logo. I painted all this graffiti that riffed off of making commercial-looking signage.

That led me into actually messing around with sign painting and actually wanting to paint signs.

The first thing I did after I was winding up from graffiti was going down to Coney Island and studying signs. I didn't just want to make signs like 4th Ave Cleaners or Cherry Tree Tavern. I wanted to make the signs that were at Coney Island, ones that were advertising fun and food and pizza. Big dimensional letters and great colors. It all looked like fun down there. It still looks like fun down there!

I had this very particular sign painting I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint fucked up looking carnival signage. So I went to Coney Island and started painting signs.

This is compressing years of traveling down there and tripping off of it until finally I was like "Oh, I'll volunteer my services and I'll be a sign painter!"

Funny thing about Coney is: You go down there and tell them that you want to do something for free, they don't believe you. They think it's a scam. They know it's a scam!

It took a long time to get people to trust me to let me paint signs for them for free. But once I did one, I had offers to do a hundred more. Once they knew I was a sucker that would do free signs, everybody was interested.

I'm actually kinda ruined from making beautiful murals. What I can make now is signs upon signs, doodles upon doodles. I make these things that are like a wall covered with bill posts. Nothing is cohesive. Everything looks sloppy and is on top of each other. It's saying a million things at once and you can't read any of it.

But that's my life. That's what I do now.

What made you open up the shop? We painted the Macy's garage at Hoyt and Schermerhorn in 2010 or 2011. While we were painting the garage, they gave us a 5000 square foot ground floor space to paint. I got used to having people around and having people work on stuff while I work. We had that for a year and a half and at the end I found out this place was available.

This is a pretty good New York story: The owner of this building wanted a tenant to occupy the front of the building so people would stop bothering him to rent the place. People kept wanting to rent the place to put a coffee shop or a pilates studio or something that they were going to have to renovate. If he wanted to rent the place out, he'd have to focus on making a lot of money. He didn't want to do any of that. I came in and I said "I like the fucked up ceiling and the fucked up floor. I want to keep it the way it is." So he gave me the keys.

We opened in 2012. We didn't really find our footing until the election. I came into work the day after the election and we all knew what was in the air. We set up a screen printing operation in the basement and we were printing t-Shirts that showed a house on fire sinking into water and it said "Could Be Worse."

It's funny, I got my ass up out of bed, hungover, it was raining, and when I got in here, we were printing these shirts. I said, "Alright, that's what we do now."

Now we read the room and try to give people messages that they can hold on to. Sometimes they make sense of it, sometimes they're angry about it. Most of the time it's just hope. We're just trying to sell a little bit of hope at the end of the day. It's been a really effective strategy for us.

It's not so much how many likes we can get or how much money we can make. It's, "Can we do something that is useful? Can we do something that people get some kind of strength from?" It made my entire art practice different. I don't feel like I'm wasting my time anymore with the work I'm doing, if nothing else. I feel like I'm actually doing what I'm supposed to be doing.

Regardless of anything else, one thing we all have now is an appreciation for a low level of anxiety. Everybody's stressed now. I think there's a lot more unity than we think. If we talk about the issue of pain, if we talk about the issue of stress; I think there's a lot more understanding than we've ever had.

What do we do with it? Hopefully we come up with a decision that makes it better. I don't even know if there is one. I'm sure if you asked 100 people that all felt the same way, what was the solution to the problem, you'd have at least 20 different answers.

But there's something that happens, especially in New York, when people realize that we're all in the same boat together. People are better to each other. People have a better attitude toward each other. That's when New York shines.

A lot of people have been saying New York is over. My understanding of it has been, since the pandemic, New York has been more interesting and a better place to live than it has in years. People are more engaged. People are better to each other. People are pursuing the best lives they can under their circumstances.

People were a lot more passive when times were better. They were just content with sitting and watching it happen. But now people have to make their own fun. And they're doing it!

Did you read the recent Seinfeld piece? He pretty much said the same thing. It was very surprising. Good for him! I think he sold all of those Porsches and now he's back to being a man of the people.

What was your favorite project to work on? The first time we worked in Coney island, it was learning about Coney Island, trying to be a good neighbor. It was a service project. We were really trying to serve the community as best we could down there.

But the second project I did down there, I worked with an organization called Creative Time. A great venerable parks organization. They've been creating public art in New York for 40 years at this point. They never work with artists more than once. It's a good rule for them to mix it up and not get comfortable. But they broke that rule with me. We did the Coney Island project two years in a row because there was so much to do and it was so interesting and so much fun.

Easily the most fun I had was when I did a project called the “Water Board Thrill Ride.“ I became a Carney operator. I created this sideshow attraction where you fed a dollar into a cinder block wall. They call it a "Grindhouse."

You peeked through bars on a window and watched two animatronic dummies, one waterboarding the other. It had a dollar feed machine, a machine that activated the dummies, and an iPod shuffle that had ten different songs that prisoners were subjected to at Guantanamo Bay when they were being tortured. We created this perfect, fucked up attraction.

They had an attraction the following Summer after Kennedy was assassinated: you could walk past Kennedy in a casket with Jackie Onassis crying next to him with blood on her clothes. I saw that and didn't know if I was going to beat it, but I was going to try.

The Water Board Thrill Ride was in the spirit of that attraction, but it also got people talking about waterboarding in the summer of 2007. At that point it had been in the paper for three or four years. People were done talking about it. By bringing it down to Coney Island, it became the perfect scenario where people started talking about it again.

I don't know if it changed anybody's mind but it got kids talking to their parents. I know a whole generation of kids went to Coney Island and saw that thing and are still thinking about it.

We made $7000 in one dollar bills. I was going to the bank every couple days with $400 in singles. They thought I was an exotic dancer.

The whole project allowed me to cross over from being a tourist, an artists’ helper, and a community activist. I became a Carney. I became this low life guy with an attraction; making money, going to the bank, keeping my thing going all summer long. I made it.

The people that know me down there, when they knew me as just an artist, they were like, "whatever." When I became a Carney they were like, "Oh, you're one of us. You're as fucked up as the rest of us." It really taught me so much about business and life.

It's kinda like if you watch enough of The Sopranos, you feel like you can run a mob family. I was in Coney Island long enough that I was like, "I can really be a carney down here. I have what it takes to be a low life, money grubbing, beach dwelling, beer drinking maniac."

The best thing about the Water Board thrill ride: I was setting it up, and a couple guys from Coney island asked me, "What are you gonna paint there? How are you gonna attract people to your attraction?" I thought, “I'll have two guys from Team America. A soldier type and another type being waterboarded.”

They said, "Fuck that shit, nobody knows about Team America. You know what you need? You need Spongebob. Spongebob is hot this year."

I was like, "Oh shit, you're fucking right!" So I did Spongebob getting waterboarded by Squidward. It was the best thing I've ever painted, without a doubt.

Interview by Cody Simons Photographs by David Jacobson