NEW YORK SprayMasters will premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on February 13, 2008 at 6 p.m.

Director Manny Kirchheimer, featured artists Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, Futura 2000, and Zephyr, and many of the musical artists featured on the original soundtrack will be present.

In SprayMasters, four ex-graffiti writers reflect on their early years as renegades who sneaked into rail yards and decorated New York subway cars with stolen paint while eluding arrest by the authorities. Now in their forties and embraced by the establishment, Lee Quinones, Lady Pink, and Futura 2000 are prominent artists with an international following, while Zephyr is a widely published journalist who writes about popular culture. They talk about the extreme risks they took as teenagers, the joys of seeing their work on subway cars, the diverse styles of graffiti, its global reach, and its place in modern life, where it has been co-opted by advertising and fashion. SprayMasters is a follow-up to Kirchheimer’s underground classic Stations of the Elevated (1980), the first film to feature New York’s infamous subway graffiti.

Although the exuberant painted trains are gone, they live again in SprayMasters, in rare footage never seen before, set to an electrifying musical soundtrack that evokes the heyday of graffiti.

A film by MANFRED KIRCHHEIMER
85 minutes, color

“Manny Kirchheimer is a consummate filmmaker.”
– The Independent

“One of the best American filmmakers.” – Wide Angle

“His films are hopeful, yet they admonish the future.”
– Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film

Check the Trailer: click here
MySpace Page: click here