Martin Wong

Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised in San Francisco, Martin Wong rose to fame in New York City during the 1980s for his striking paintings of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His works balanced images of the desolation and destruction he saw on the streets with an explosion of various writing systems, poetry, and astronomical signs across the sky. Wong’s art and collecting also reveal his deep bonds with artists and writers who lived in the neighborhood.

A devotee of calligraphy, Wong regarded letter writing as an art form. Sent to his parents soon after he moved to New York, the centerpiece of First letter home from New York (also I joined the Museum of Modern Art) is Wong’s drawing of the Brooklyn Bridge and FDR drive, landmarks that he saw from the window of his room at the Myers Hotel in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, where he lived between 1978 and 1981. The expressive script relates his impressions of Manhattan, including his first visit to MoMA, which he humorously describes as a “drop in center for out of town artists.” Wong’s letter functioned as a map of his whereabouts and foreshadows the structure of paintings he would create in the 1980s, with titles based on the locations they portrayed and a city skyline filled with text he based on various writing systems—such as American Sign Language (ASL) and those he had studied in Asia earlier in life—and stylized personal embellishments. Wong’s postscript asking his mother to ship a Mimbres bowl (from his vast collection of ceramics, art, and knickknacks) to Sotheby’s auction house reveals a lesser known but equally important part of his artistic practice. For him, collecting art went hand in hand with creating it.  

In 1981 Wong moved farther uptown (but still downtown), to a predominately Puerto Rican section of the Lower East Side known as “Loisaida.” Although the city’s power brokers condemned the area as an urban wasteland, the resident artists and poets involved in the Nuyorican movement were fostering a cultural effluence of spoken-word poetry, performance art, music, muralism, and graffiti. Stanton near Forsyth Street is emblematic of that period in Wong’s life. The painting features a rare self-portrait of Wong with his muse, Miguel Piñero, a poet, playwright, actor, and cofounder of the Nuyorican Poets Café. Piñero’s semi-autobiographical writings about outlaws who use their wits to survive on the city’s streets and in its prison system earned critical acclaim. The text above Piñero’s head is excerpted from a Spanish-language photo novella, Los Sonobulos. The words carved into the trompe-l’oeil frame and reproduced in ASL are the closing lines from a poem Wong wrote and illustrated a decade earlier, “Psychic Bandits” (c. 1970–73): “Morning at the edge of time. It never really mattered.”¹

Houston Street is a life-size replica of a worn corrugated metal gate, one in a series of 10 paintings of closed storefronts that Wong rendered for The Last Picture Show. This Conceptual installation at Semaphore Gallery documented Loisaida’s precarity, a consequence of the city government’s neglect and gentrification.² Wong’s prior training as a ceramicist and oil painter is evident in the care he took to replicate the gate’s erosion by layering thin coats of paint in uneven patches of white, gray, black, and brown across the surface of the canvas. Painted on the back of Houston Street is an unfinished collaboration with graffiti artists Aaron “Sharp” Goodstone and Calvin Gonzalez, aka Delta 2. Wong was a passionate advocate for the preservation of graffiti art. In 1985 he opened a graffiti art museum to showcase his storehouse of pieces created by New York’s iconic aerosol artists. “Martin was a champion of our movement years after the first wave was stripped off the trains and our canvases receded from art world appreciation,” wrote the graffiti artist Lee Quiñones. “He often sought advice from me, Daze, and a few others on key works he should acquire. Sometimes he listened, sometimes he didn’t, but Martin embraced our movement and the broad constellation of contributors like no one else.”³ When he was diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1990s, Wong began planning to distribute his collection. He donated 300 graffiti works from his collection to the Museum of the City of New York.⁴ In 2001 his family established the Martin Wong Foundation to provide scholarships to students studying art at four universities in California, Arizona, and New York.

Despite his deep engagement with the contemporary scene around him, Wong connected his work to a long tradition in art history. “Basically, I am a Chinese landscape painter,” he once said. “If you look at Chinese landscapes in the museum, they have writing in the sky. They write a poem in the sky and so do I.” 

Note: Opening quote is from Ramirez, Yasmin, and Martin Wong. “Chino-Latino: The Loisaida Interview.” In Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Bronx Museum of the Arts (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015).

Yasmin Ramirez, art historian, 2024