Lady Pink, born Sandra Fabara, is an Ecuadorian-American graffiti and mural artist. She has focused her career on empowering women, using graffiti and murals as acts of rebellion and self-expression. As Lady Pink says, "It's not just a boys club. We have a sisterhood thing going." She was nicknamed the "first lady of graffiti" because she was one of the first women active in the early 1980s New York City subway graffiti subculture. In 1980, she created the all-female graffiti crew Ladies of the Arts. Within a few years, Lady Pink began running with the graffiti crews TC5 and TPA. From 1979 to 1985, Lady Pink painted New York City Subway trains. She took a short hiatus in 1987 from painting outdoors. Then in 1993 to 1997 she worked on freight trains with her husband, Smith. In 1980, she was included in the landmark New York show "GAS: Graffiti Art Success" at Fashion Moda, which traveled in a modified form downtown to The New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Early life
Fabara was born in Ambato, Ecuador, in 1964 and moved to the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, New York when she was seven years old. She grew up wanting to be an architect like her father. She started her graffiti writing career in 1979 following the loss of a boyfriend. She exorcised her grief by tagging her boyfriend's name across New York City. Lady Pink studied at the High School of Art & Design in Manhattan. As a student there, she was introduced to graffiti and began writing at age fifteen. She is married to another graffiti artist, SMITH, with whom she often collaborates on murals and commercial work.
Name origin
Lady Pink was first given her name “Pink” by Seen TC5. The name was chosen for aesthetics because the name Pink is feminine and because she wanted other writers to know that she was a girl. Lady Pink also said that the letters appealed to her; the way the "K" kicked out and how the "I" was cute and could be dotted with a heart. She started calling herself Lady Pink because of her love of historical romances, England, the Victorian period, and the aristocracy. She titled herself like royalty. She never wanted to tag her full name because she did not want to be associated with the Pink Lady, a woman in the club scene who sold pink cocaine.
Career
Early career
Lady Pink’s Career as an artist started to take off after the 1980s, following the Graffiti Art Success for America show which invited graffiti artists to paint on the walls of the gallery. In 1983, she played the leading role in the film Wild Style,and was involved with a book entitled Subway Art by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant. During this time, she collaborated with Jenny Holzer several times for an exhibition at Fashion MODA. Her first solo show, "Femmes-Fatales," was in 1984, when she was 21, at the Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia.
