International Graffiti Times – 1884-1994

Dedicated to New York City street art, International Graffiti Times – IGTimes (aka: Subway Sun, InterGalactic Times, GetHip International Times, Tight and IGT) announced itself with an image of the city’s Mayor Ed Koch covered in tags.

After Koch, the arch enemy of “graffiti”, there were articles on artist Michael Stewart (May 9, 1958 – September 28, 1983), who died following an arrest by New York City Transit Police for writing graffiti on a New York City Subway wall at the First Avenue station, and interviews with SAK, who founded a crew called MBT (Masters burning together), and RIZE, two teenage “writers” who were “burning” trains.

 

 

IGTimes was founded by David Schmidlapp, an artist and photographer who produced photomontages and stories of street fashion for the style section of the Soho Weekly News (1973 – 1982).

One notable staffer was graffiti artist Phase 2 (nee Michael Lawrence Marrow; August 2, 1955 – December 12, 2019), whom Schmidlapp had interviewed for issue 2. Starting in the early 1970s, Phase 2 was a leading proponent of aerosol calligraphy and designed many flyers for hip-hop parties in his native Bronx. For him, tagging provided disadvantaged urban teens “the only significant vehicle to represent their existence”.

A member of Hugo Martinez’s United Graffiti Artists (1972-1975) – in September 1973, UGA organized the first gallery show of graffiti at the Razor Gallery in SoHo – Phase 2 was one of the first artists to translate his art from the Subway to the canvas. In 1986 he became the IGTimes art director (issues 8 to 15).

 

 

In the late 1990s Schmidlapp set aside 100 complete sets of IGTimes and numbered and placed each set in a portfolio. You can pick one up a full set at Gallery 98, which is also selling individually selected IGT pages chosen because they were designed as flat posters and are particularly suitable for framing.

All copies of IGT were printed as double-sided sheets measuring 17 x 22 in. These pages were then folded like maps and in most cases their design reflects the folded partitions. In a few instances pages were conceived as single entities so they could be unfolded and hung as posters.

 

 

In 2011 the IGTimes archive was acquired by Cornell University’s Hip Hop Collection.