96 pages Edited by Chris Stain 30 x 23 cm Language: English Paperback Publisher: Drago 2012
The first monograph by Chris Stain, published to accompany his exhibition at the Wooster St. Social Club in New York. Born in 1972 and raised in the working-class neighbourhood of Highlandtown, Baltimore, Stain came up writing graffiti in the mid-1980s before printmaking classes in high school pushed him toward the stencil work he is now known for — spray paint, X-Acto knife and Dura-Lar, portraits of the people cities tend to look past.
Rather than a portfolio, the book is assembled as an autobiographical scrapbook: writings, letters, photographs, personal memorabilia and artwork laid out in a deliberately DIY manner, tracing where the imagery comes from before showing the imagery itself. The social realist strain in the work — routinely compared to the American painters of the 1930s and 1940s — reads here as biography rather than as style.
