Product Description : Dondi White Style Master General: The Life of Graffiti Artist Dondi White In the beginning there was the Word On the streets and in the yards the word was the Name And the name was everything It was persona and place form and content truth and fiction The name was an act of selfinvention a pure visual manifestation through alter ego alias and nom de plume of personal expressions in the public realm The name was a line and the line begat the Mark Then in the great style wars toward the end of the second millennium medium meaning and message were joined in a golden era where the name became the source and signifier of Style And when the name became wild style the word was Dondi from the ForewordThe dominance of the graffiti aesthetic in contemporary culture is undeniable But how did an art form spawned in the train yards of 1970s New York achieve the ubiquity it now enjoys at every level of the massmedia landscape There are many answers to the question but one major factor is indisputable Dondi WhiteComing of age in hardscrabble East New York in the early 1970s Dondi White unknowingly began the process of introducing a whole new artistic dialect into the cacophony of the American art scene His train pieces painted from roughly 1977 to 1982 stand as some of the most influential works ever committed to Transit Authority steel Writing with legendary partners such as DURO NOC 167 KID 56 KEL 139 and FUZZ ONE Dondi created some of graffiti arts most enduring iconography His pieces just dont stop and neither do the aliases From the badass Mr Whites to the cocky selfsatisfied Busses from the nasty Pres to the perfect vicious Rolls Dondi straight killed it again and again Works like Children of the Grave Part 2 and Mr White Bev remain benchmark pieces for graffiti aficionados the world overIn the 1980s partially through his collaborations with noted photographers Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper Dondi Whites work entered the rarefied world of fine art In making the transition from subway car to canvas Dondi retained his unfaltering sense of letter form and balance and his paintings remain a testament to the clarity of his aesthetic Dondis canvases were subsequently shown in galleries from New York to Amsterdam to Tokyo and beyond influencing a new generation of young artists and introducing an indigenous American art form to the rest of the worldDondi White Style Master General presents the life and work of a seminal yet heretofore overlooked American artist whose work has resonated on every level of our popular culture Filled with rare photographs original sketches unpublished interview materials and testimony from some of Dondis closest cohorts here finally is the full story At the time of his death in 1998 Dondi had seen the majority of his work destroyed scraped off painted over or chemically removed from the steel upon which it thrived Within these pages however it still speaks volumes(it is an used product).