Downtown Drive-by : NYC Graffiti & Street Art '81-'84

In Downtown Drive-by, Jon Waldo provides a visual, time capsule from a very different New York. The city was cheap and incredibly interesting at that time. New, challenging art and music seemed to appear every day. Graffiti was evolving, too. Uptown and on the trains, incredible wild-style pieces were blowing up. Downtown was alive with a flux of messages and marks. Beautiful images were turning up one day and painted over the next—with images bleeding into each other and colliding in unexpected ways. "The visual energy was incredible and life-changing for me."Waldo had graduated from art school a year earlier and the work he was interested in was very conceptual and minimal. It asked a lot of questions about the formal aspects of artwork. "But Downtown quickly taught me what art could be. Graffiti was a public art for everyone to see. You didn't have to be enclosed in a gallery situation. You could just see it and do it."Waldo's first job when he got back to the city was driving a truck and delivering art supplies for David Davis. His store sold to everybody and he got to go to a lot of cool studios but was captivated by the work he saw on the street while driving between deliveries. "Photography for me was an expensive proposition, but almost unconsciously, I got a used camera and just started taking pictures when I was driving for work. I had the need to possess what I saw."These pictures are a portal. They are from a world of terrible tragedy and great creativity. "I feel blessed to be a witness to that time."