CUBA

AUTO BIO GRAPHY #TWO

CUBA

AUTO BIO GRAPHY #TWO

Date

2021

Edition Size

unique

Media

Acrylic, Hand-painting, Marker pen

Binding

Cloth case, Hand-sewn

Pages

10

Location

San Francisco, CA

$ 2,800.00

Unavailable


View Collectors

University of Delaware Library

Beloved San Francisco Graffiti Godfather Cuba’s (AKA – Clarence Robbs) has been painting an epic series of autobiographical books illuminating both his enigmatic life and an encyclopedic history of graffiti letterform in the United States. Each hand-painted book passionately conveys a chapter of Cuba’s unique journey through the culture and politics of the USA. Unbound by any (read White?) conventions of either biography or book-making, the book forms and titles in this open series of unique books have more in common with medieval Arabic manuscripts than with contemporary printed limited edition artists’ books.

AUTO BIO GRAPHY is the new sub-series in the larger body of Cuba’s autobiographies, in this volume, #TWO, Cuba describes himself as an LSD imbibing teenager and reveals the intriguing details of how he came to use the tag “Cuba” (which involves both a live show of the band XTC and some of the previously referred to LSD imbibing. He also talks about the cultural landscape of Baltimore in the 1970’s and his first encounter with REVOLT. REVOLT mostly wrote in Queens, Brooklyn, NY, and he was a major force in the New York graffiti scene of the 1970s and 80s. He was an original member of the historic NYC subway graffiti crew, The Rolling Thunder Writers (RTW). The writing ‘tour’ of Baltimore that Revolt did in the 1970s, which Cuba writes about being strongly influenced by, is attributed by some graffiti historians, as having introduced NYC style to the Baltimore graffiti scene.

Binding: Sophia Kramer
Book Design: Marshall Weber
Archive of Cuba’s books
Institutional Collectors: University of Delaware