WAR, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?, 2011
Lady Pink (born Sandra Fabara, Ambato, Ecuador, 1964) is a graffiti and mural artist based in New York City. Nicknamed the “first lady of graffiti” because she was one of the first women active in the early 1980s subway graffiti subculture. Sandra Fabara was raised in Queens. She started her graffiti writing career in 1979 following the loss of a boyfriend who had been sent to live in Puerto Rico after he had been arrested. She exorcised her grief by tagging her boyfriend’s name across New York City. Soon after she started tagging the name Lady Pink, derived from her love of historical romances. Within a few years LADY PINK began running with TC5 (The Cool 5) and TPA (The Public Animals) graffiti crews. Lady Pink painted New York City Subway trains from 1979 to 1985. In 1983, she starred in the lead role in the film Wild Style and collaborated with Jenny Holzer. Her pieces are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Brooklyn Museum and the Groningen Museum of the Netherlands.
