Dylan Fareed Notebook

I’ve sketched a favorite peice of graffiti from a decade’s old memory. I first noticed it out my sideview mirror while driving up Bowery some sunny day in something like 2010(?!).

The graffiti was on the side of a building across the street from the New Museum. It faced a construction site on the adjacent lot.

I drove around the block to look at it again. Some time later, a new building went up – making good on the construction site’s ominous promise.

I still laugh about what I understand the joke to be here … more often than one might expect. I like that it’s a work about the context of its own making. You read the words on the building and you think about how they got there. You don’t imagine someone reaching an extending paint roller over the ledge to paint down. You picture a miraculously tall person standing in the construction site, painting up, and blown away by the simple facts of their own body – and the words become a monmument, however temporarily.

Published on 2023-11-01 1m read