BEYOND THE STREETS Los Angeles, 2018. Kenny Scharf Photo by Beau Roulette.

Kenny Scharf grew up in the safe, perennially sunny suburbs of San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles, and moved to New York in the late ’70s to attend the School of Visual Arts, where he became roommates with Keith Haring and found himself in the middle of the 1980s East Village Art movement. In the swirl of the downtown scene, Scharf created his trademark Cosmic Caverns, immersive experiences of Day-Glo paintings and black light that doubled as disco parties. His stylized aliens and colorful Pop icons have garnered widespread recognition and he continues to work in collage, sculpture, painting and performance, based in New York. 

In the 1960s, the heady Abstract Expressionism of Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, et al., had all but given way to its young and unruly usurper, Pop Art, forcing museums and collectors to wrap their heads around a new paradigm whose muse was mass culture and whose reigning monarch, Andy Warhol, presided over a strange cabal of glorious freaks, drag queens and junkies.

Then the 1970s rolled around — something was cooking in the new multicultural bohemia that was emerging in downtown New York. The so-called downtown scene was, in a sense, the dysfunctional bastard child of Pop Art, mutated from the cross-pollination and manic postmodern energy of the streets and nightclubs of the city. Embedded in this lunatic fringe was a young painter — his name Kenny Scharf, founding father of a feral expression that exists between street and gallery, an outsider art that is not entirely naive, but rather possessed of a high-low mobility that has earned it followers and detractors in equal measure. Many call it street art, but Scharf never really liked that term.

Kenny Scharf Art Career

Heaven & Hell #2, Acrylic, Marker & Spray Paint On Canvas, 1981 - Courtesy of Kenny Scharf

Kenny Scharf’s art career was when he moved from L.A. to New York in the late ’70s to attend the School of Visual Arts and became roommates with a young, passionate artist called Keith Haring, who was interested in Jean Dubuffet’s approach to aesthetics and Art Brut, ideas that favored art born purely from creative impulse, art without professional aspiration — much like the art that was being made by the subway graffiti artists all over the city, which inspired Haring to explore the subway system as a venue for displaying his own deliberately primitive markings. Scharf, meanwhile, was confounding his teachers by melting plastic dinosaurs onto TVs, among other sculptural experiments. He too was inspired by the emergent graffiti scene and became interested in spray paint as a medium for his own work, befriending graffiti artists like DAZE and HAZE. 

Unlike Haring, who rarely used spray paint, Scharf loved to apply swirling, precise Krylon lines to his own painterly ideas, his visions of Pop Surrealism rooted in cosmic iconography, psychedelia, Googie architecture and The Jetsons, in a garish, saccharine palette. Kenny Scharf’s art work was too out-of-the-box for mainstream galleries, so with nowhere to show his work beyond the audacious but tiny FUN Gallery, he bombed the street, injecting the grim, dangerous landscape of urban decay with comic-surreal blobs and happy H-bomb mushroom clouds. 

Self With Cadillac, 1979, Courtesy of Kenny Scharf

The sheer space and possibility afforded him by the street allowed Scharf’s work to take on monumental status. “I never professed to be a graffiti artist, nor a street artist either,” says Scharf. “I just found that hitting the street was the best way to get out there. Especially living in New York City, where all these art people weren’t interested in looking at my work or accepting me in a gallery. I wanted to confront them, I wanted them to have no choice but to see me.” 

Kenny Scharf collected ephemera from the streets of the old, feral New York he fondly remembers as “funky town.” (In those days, Scharf could often be spotted walking down Broadway with his “pet” — a vacuum cleaner he had painted a multitude of colors.) He hand-painted broken appliances in Day-Glo colors, which he built into installations, the first one in the closet of the Times Square apartment he shared with Haring, dubbed the “Cosmic Closet.” (Later the Closet became a Cavern.) 

Passion Behind Kenny Scharf Paintings 

 Faces In Places Oil On Linen With Aluminum, Courtesy of Kenny Scharf

In 2004, the Pasadena Museum of California Art mounted a retrospective of Scharf’s work. Kenny Scharf: California Grown featured paintings, screenings of The Groovenians and bronze sculptures in the third-floor gallery. When Scharf laid eyes on the bare walls of the museum’s 10,000-square foot parking garage, he had an idea. “I asked them if I could paint the garage, knowing that it would last a lot longer than the show,” he says. Spray paint seemed the most appropriate solution for the space. 

The result was a permanent installation called the “Kosmic Krylon Garage,” bringing life to an otherwise dead space and reawakening a part of Scharf that had been dormant for nearly 20 years. Around this time, the work of artists on the streets of London, Paris, Melbourne and across the U.S. reinvigorated ideas of urban space as a legitimate canvas, with a new aesthetic distinct from graffiti. 

For the new generation of street artists, many of them art-school graduates, people like Scharf, Haring and Basquiat served as inspirational touchstones, founding fathers of their world. In 2009, Kenny Scharf was asked to contribute a mural to a “museum of the streets'' — the Wynwood Walls — in tandem with Art Basel Miami Beach, as envisioned by the late arts visionary and developer Tony Goldman and Jeffrey Deitch, then director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. As he prepared to paint his first outdoor mural in 20 years, Scharf felt a sense of homecoming. “It felt like, wow I’m doing this again. Only bigger. And sanctioned.” In 2010, Scharf was invited back to the Houston Bowery wall (also owned by Tony Goldman, who had dedicated the space to street art). 

The Kenny Scharf painting was a huge, ecstatic psychedelic wallscape with aerosol paint, in an emotionally charged return to a place that held so many memories and symbolized the beginnings of an entire movement, the genius of a fallen friend. In a blow for Scharf, the mural was almost immediately tagged over, with such deliberate and malicious precision it was hard for him not to take it personally. “I had a really tough time after doing that wall,” says Scharf. “It’s such a high-profile space, and there are so many writers that want to get on it, and a lot of them don’t know who I am. I come from a different world and time, and, well, let’s just say they annihilated it. Annihilated it.” Had a protective coating been applied after Scharf completed the mural, it would have been easy to power-hose off the tags — but somehow that step had been forgotten. 

So in the middle of winter, Scharf climbed up a ladder in front of the Bowery wall again and began to repair the mural. “It was freezing, very difficult to see what was underneath and much more difficult than initially painting it. So there I was, looking at somebody’s big, ugly tag and trying to bring back what was there. It was 100 times harder than doing the original mural.” Midway through painting, a blizzard hit. Kenny Scharf left the site and when he returned, the mural had been bombed again. Scharf expressed his disappointment on graffiti blogs and found himself the subject of death threats from people who, presumably, had no idea of his involvement in the earliest days of the wall they were claiming as theirs. “They were, like, threatening to kill me,” says Scharf. “Yes, it’s the Internet; yes, people say a lot of crazy shit. But it was clear they didn’t know or care about their own history.” Which was why when MOCA launched its Art in the Streets exhibit in 2011, the first major museum retrospective of graffiti, Scharf welcomed it as a vital educational opportunity. 

The Kenny Scharf show included a re-creation of the FUN Gallery where Scharf had his first display show, and a full re-creation of the “Cosmic Cavern.” It was the most successful show in the history of MOCA, and seeing the lines snake around the block, Scharf was inspired — unlike museum trustees, who felt that the show was skewed to the wrong kind of audience. This irked Scharf, almost as much as his mural getting painted over. “The people who came to the Art in the Streets show were not the people buying tables at the gala dinners,” says Scharf. “Sometimes I think museums would rather remain ghost towns than pack the place with people that make them feel uncomfortable. The art world looks at art for the people as dumb art, but I see it differently. I look at it like...let’s bring up the masses. Let’s help people smart up.” When he paints on the street these days, he paints alone, without assistants, and fast. “I knock out these murals in two, three days. Sometimes when I get there, there are these younger artists working on their own murals. They’ve been there two weeks and they’ve got crews with them, and then I walk in and I’m just like, OK, I’m done, goodbye. I like to be able to show the kids that getting older doesn’t mean you become any less powerful.” 

Kenny Scharf’s Mural 

Kenny Scharf recently installed a 3D mural in Bombay Beach near the Salton Sea (at the Bombay Beach Biennale, curated by Lily Johnson White), a post-apocalyptic desert landscape about three hours east of Los Angeles. There, it’s cheap and wild enough for young artists to go and develop their voices without enduring the crushing overheads of New York or L.A., assuming they are OK with 120-degree heat, isolation and a preponderance of meth labs. “The Salton Sea...that place is such, like, end of the world,” muses Scharf. “Like, the world’s over, let’s just live here...kind of like New York in the ’70s.” Which would be most challenging for an artist, though — Bombay Beach in July, or crime-ridden New York City in the ’70s and ’80s? He takes a second to think about it. “You know...they’re probably actually on a par.