Lady Pink was just five years old when she killed her first snake with her bare feet on her grandparents' sugarcane plantation in the Amazon rainforest. "That shows what a precocious and fearless kid I was," says the 61-year-old artist, whose energy and raucous laughter make her a force to be reckoned with even over a phone call from upstate New York.
The venerated graffiti artist recently opened her solo exhibition "Miss Subway NYC" at D'Stassi Art in London, where she has vividly recreated a New York City subway station complete with paintings in eye-popping colors depicting trains, train yards, and playful portraits of typical subway characters including a busker in a cat costume, an elderly lady with a shopping cart, and a chihuahua. Working alongside her husband Smith, also a graffiti artist, she meticulously reproduced layers of tags on the walls from her heyday, when she risked arrest and sometimes her life to spray paint across the city at night. Over 1,000 people attended the opening night to pay their respects to the grande dame of graffiti.
Born Sandra Fabara in Ambato, Ecuador, in 1964, Lady Pink's story begins on that Amazon plantation where wild terrain and dangerous wildlife didn't intimidate her. Her mother had returned there after leaving Pink's father, whom she describes as "an agricultural engineer who was a womanizer, gambler, cheater." When Pink was seven, her mother had saved enough money for them to leave Ecuador for New York City. "When we came here, we had no papers, we didn't speak the language," Pink recalls.
Despite the challenges, Pink was a self-assured, determined, and talented child who quickly learned to channel her pain and grief into creativity. She first entered the graffiti world at 15 after her boyfriend was arrested for tagging and sent to live with relatives in Puerto Rico. "I cried for a whole month, then I started tagging his name everywhere," she remembers. A painting in her London exhibition showing the artist as a teenager kissing a handsome boy pays tribute to this defining moment in her personal history.
When Pink started high school in Queens, she met kids who knew how to access train yards and tunnels. "The more they said, 'You can't, you're a girl,' the more I had to prove them wrong. I was stubborn as a mule. I was crazy," she explains. As one of the only women accepted by New York's notoriously macho graffiti scene in the late 1970s, she quickly gained a reputation for tagging subway trains. "We are like a guild, a clannish, tribal group who go out at night and watch each other's backs."
She earned her official moniker "Pink" from fellow TC5 crew member Seen. "I was the only female in the city painting, and I needed a female name so everyone would know our crew tolerated a female," she explains. "I knew I was the token female and that got my foot in the door, but to keep up with the big bad boys, I had to back it up with real talent too. There was sexism of course, but I'm a little bit of a badass. I don't appreciate being walked over and I stand up strongly for myself. Even if I'm petite, I'm loud. Don't judge me by my size, judge me by how big and fast I paint!"
The "Lady" title was initially inspired by European nobility in the historical romance novels she was reading, though she admits, "I don't write Lady because I'm terrible at the letter Y." Later, she used the Lady title to avoid confusion with the pop singer Pink, who once approached the artist to design her first album cover. "I said, 'Hell no! Are you kidding me?' But she's a fan, I'm not going to say anything bad about her, she's fine, she sings fine."
As a young woman venturing into New York's most dangerous neighborhoods at night in 1979, Pink was especially vulnerable. "I would dress like a boy and pretend to be a boy. The teens I ran with weren't much bigger than me and I knew they weren't there to protect me if something went wrong. You're in the worst neighborhoods of New York City relying on the kindness of strangers to save your life – you've got to be prepared. What happens in the dark alleys of cities, you don't want to know. You shake a spray can and hope they let you live."
Bombing subway trains ranks among the most perilous graffiti activities, with many young people dying from being run over by trains or electrocuted. "It's live electricity: if you touch the rail you will die," Pink warns. Her survival strategy was methodical: "You don't stumble in like you're drunk, it's like a military maneuver. You know the train schedules, where to walk, where to hide. You have all of that figured out ahead of time. You need to be sure where you're going when you're running like panicked rats in the dark maze."
Despite careful planning, Pink experienced several close calls. She once sliced her finger open badly but refused medical attention. "It was bleeding badly, it was a terrible cut and I probably should have had it stitched, but I just stuck it in my pocket and it quietly bled in there. I didn't want people to say: 'Oh you're a girl you're hurt and crying, you're going to slow us down,' you've got to be a good soldier."
Another incident nearly cost her life when she miscalculated while using the bathroom near the tracks. "I had gone to pee and I thought I could just walk it," she laughs. "Then there was a train coming and it was doing a weird curve, slanting into the wall. At the last minute I ducked, but if I had stayed standing the train would've taken my head off. After that, I just ran at top speed. I can't believe I survived it."
The 1980s brought a whirlwind of recognition. Pink rose to fame in 1983 after appearing in "Wild Style," the cult film that launched American hip-hop culture globally. Her spray-painted canvases – horror vacui compositions with bold, attention-grabbing colors depicting street-inspired scenes – began gaining acceptance in conventional, legal art spaces. In 1984, she was included in MoMA PS1's "The New Portrait" alongside Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring. "No one was aware it was going to launch anything, we were just in it for the moment and the money. People told us the art market was fickle and eventually we'd have to get jobs."
Pink once invited Keith Haring to paint a train with her. "Just me and him, no machismo – but dude was not down, he didn't want to cross the line of breaking laws. What he did was chalk on boards. He was a white dude; he wasn't incurring any kind of arrests. They weren't graffiti artists, but they were the original street artists. Graffiti artists work with spray, with fonts – and we hit stuff with wheels."
Pink also collaborated with Jenny Holzer, who was wheatpasting her Truisms posters in Manhattan. "We were like the only women going out at night doing things. She was a tall lady, like two meters, she would wear a hoodie and a big coat so she could pass off as a man going around at night alone. I am very small and I couldn't pass off like that, so I had to run with a crew. She reached out to me and suggested we collaborate."
Holzer had transformed an entire building in the Lower East Side. "It was wild out there at that time, there were a lot of people doing drugs, there was a lot of crime. But she made this beautiful, safe building, and I loved going there and working with her." Holzer would prepare three-meter-square canvases for Lady Pink to spray paint her images on, pairing them with text. The works were later displayed at MoMA and Tate Modern. In 1983, 19-year-old Pink was photographed by Lisa Kahane wearing a vest emblazoned with Holzer's famous words: "Abuse of power comes as no surprise." In 2017, the photo went viral as an emblem of the MeToo movement.
When artwork sales and interest declined in the late 1980s, Pink adapted by establishing a mural company with her husband, taking on public commissions and community work. While many peers struggled with the transition, Pink successfully adapted to mainstream business practices. "Many of my peers couldn't handle the business, they couldn't leave the ghetto behind, they couldn't show up on time or answer a phone call," she says. "Artists don't know how to hustle, and you've gotta hustle, hustle, hustle. Some don't have the courage. But good grief, you've got to go knocking on doors!"
Pink stopped illegally painting subway trains decades ago – "now I save my crazy for the galleries" – but the subway spirit lives on in her London exhibition. She continues paying the price for her years of youthful rebellion. Twelve years ago, she and her husband moved upstate after repeated police raids on their NYC home. "They took my stuff – including my husband – and messed with us. We had to spend money on an expensive attorney. They've told me to stick to the indoor stuff and not paint big old murals because they inspire people. I said yeah – community people, poets, artists, I should hope I inspire people!"
Despite the challenges, Pink has no regrets. "Street art is the biggest art movement, we are in every corner of the world. By whatever means possible, we are taking over this world, it's our whole plan! I think it's cool, man – you've got to take control of your environment. You don't need an MA to be an artist, you just need a little paint plus a little courage. Just do it!"
Lady Pink: Miss Subway NYC runs at D'Stassi Art in London until late September, celebrating the legacy of a pioneering artist who transformed from an undocumented immigrant child into one of the most influential figures in graffiti and street art history.
