Art is what Cey Adams has been producing since he was a teenager growing up in Queens.

But, it wasn’t always seen that way.

“That's the problem with labels. If there was no such thing as graffiti, people wouldn't be having these conversations. They would just see art,” Adams said.

What You Need To Know

  • Legendary graffiti artists Cey Adams and Pink Lady both heavily influenced hip-hop on its rise in popularity

  • Street art became an integral part of hip-hop culture with some of the leading figures of this movement eventually showing their work in museums and galleries

  • Many of those pioneers of graffiti art are still working today, collaborating with students and neighborhood organizations

And although he doesn't want to be pigeonholed, there is one label he can't escape, and in fact embraces: hip-hop pioneer.

“I think of hip-hop as this movement that was made by young people, for young people. Whether you were making art, music, dance, DJ culture, all of it. We were trying to be seen and trying to be heard in a city that was busy, noisy.”

For Adams, the thread that connected hip-hop and graffiti art was precisely its youth culture: teens and young adults inventing a new art form.

“I think wanting to paint subway trains was about identity. It was about figuring out how you could be bigger than your little life in your home with your parents and your brothers and sisters. And I felt like a superhero. I had this secret identity.”

A secret identity he shared with many other young artists in those early days, armed with spray-paint cans.

They fanned across the city tagging walls and subway cars.

“I had guts. I had courage. I was foolish and reckless and absolutely an insane teenager with a passion for my art that nothing could stop me. Not the police, not my parents, not the authorities,” said fellow artist Lady Pink.

She was only 15 when she began sneaking out of her home in Queens late at night, falling in love with the adventure and thrills of creating graffiti art.

But those thrills came with a price.

“It's absolutely brutal. Which is why a lot of women did not do that. Going to the worst neighborhoods in New York City, because that's where they parked the trains, climbing big walls with a heavy knapsack in the middle of the night. Freezing conditions, trekking through swamps and slippery rocks by a river, climbing fences with razor wire. Yeah…that's what we called fun,” she said.

That anti-establishment sensibility helped shape and define hip-hop culture, something that Adams brought along with him when he first started working with musicians and began putting his stamp on some of the most iconic logos and album covers of the time as the founding creative director of Def Jam Recordings.

“I don't know if I ever took a breath to think about hip-hop becoming this massive thing. The thing I realized first and foremost was that I had a lane all to myself. I was a graphic designer, an art director, a creative director and it gave me a freedom that was so special,” Adams said.

Five decades later, the work continues unabated, and his list of projects keeps growing, along with his influence on the younger generation of artists.

“Just because somebody's in their fifties or sixties, it doesn't mean that they don't have new information that they can bestow upon people. And that's the joy of being an artist, you just continue to create,” Adams said.

While Adams continues to live and work in New York City, Lady Pink has decamped two hours north, but her presence is still felt in neighborhoods like Astoria, where she grew up.

She continues to collaborate with community organizations and school kids to create public art.   

“It does not have to be confined to a gallery or museum space. It can be right down the street from you, down your block, part of the fabric of your everyday life,” she said. “That's art as it should be for everyone, by everyone. So, we have changed the world.”