Lady Pink and Me

from Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, 1977-79, T-shirt worn by Lady Pink, NY, 1983

Lady Pink aka Sandra Fabares is an artist who emerged from the burgeoning graffiti subculture of the late 70s and early 80s.  As far as I know, I share one thing in common with Lady Pink.  Her heritage.  She was born in Ambato, Ecuador like my grandmother.

Confident, self-assured, and determined to write graffiti with the boys, Lady Pink is the epitome of coolness.  While still in high school, she was already exhibiting paintings in art galleries and appeared in the first feature film about hip hop Wild Style, released in 1983, as Lee Quinones mercurial love interest.

In 1982, while Lady Pink was hanging out with Jean Michel Basquiat, Lee Quinones, Keith Haring, DONDI, FAB 5 FREDDY and REVOLT, I was a scrawny sixth-grader in catholic school.  Fiction for me at that age had all to do with the fables I told my classmates.  I created this alter ego who ran around the lower east side smoking cigarettes, kissing gang member b-boys, and shoplifting at Unique, a trendy shop in rundown Soho.  My tall tales earned me a place in a hip hop dance crew at school.  I wasn’t very good but I had rhythm so I could fake a fancy freestyle move or two.  After a couple of weeks of practice, we performed once at a school charity event and then amicably disbanded.

Copyright © 2010 by Gessy Alvarez

In truth, my only connection to the downtown NYC scene were my family’s late summer, back-to-school shopping jaunts to Soho and the Lower East Side. My mother would drag us to about fifty stores in one afternoon.  These stores were mostly owned by Orthodox Jewish families and had little room for display racks or cases. Instead, merchandise was hung on clothes lines.  The merchandise included flower-printed boxy panties for females of all ages, knee-high socks for the whole family, men’s tidy whities and ladies’ flesh-colored, shiny polyester bras. Each item was tagged with a numbered index cards, so all you had to do was point to the panty you liked and the shopkeeper would run to the stock room and come back out with a corresponding box.  For $15 my mother would buy me enough panties and navy, knee-high wool socks to last me the entire school year.

Little did I know that at the height of the Reagan years, AIDS would decimate the scene I longed to belong to, that Drew Barrymore would go from bad girl to a Nancy Reagan soldier for the war against drugs, and that I would become a member of FBLA, the Future Business Leaders of America (a long story which I promise to delve into in a future post).

As for Lady Pink, she survived the 80s like a true warrior.  She’s still very active as an artist and has been collected by the Brooklyn Museum, the Met and the Whitney.  You can see a number of her work online…

© Gessy Alvarez and Digging Through the Fat, 2010