Stay High 149 (graffiti artist)
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During the early 1970s the graffiti artist STAY HIGH 149 painted his unique tag on hundreds of New York City subway cars, particularly on the IRT line. He is one of the most influential and admired artists in New York's graffiti scene.[citation needed]
STAY HIGH 149 was most admired for his unique tag. He drew a smoking joint as the cross bar for his "H". Each tag was accompanied by a stick figure from the television series The Saint. He also frequently wrote the phrase "Voice of the Ghetto".
STAY HIGH 149's tagcame to define "street cool" for subsequent generations of writers.[citation needed] He is one of the most frequently mentioned influences for New York City writers. One of the most famous pieces in aerosol art to date is the STAY HIGH 149 top-to-bottom tag on the IRT subway, which was documented in Norman Mailer's 1974 book The Faith of Graffiti. The painting, completed in 1973, was an early top-to-bottom whole car.[citation needed] As with most pieces of the time period, it was simply an extremely large version of his tag. His subway paintings also appeared in 1974 in a Richard Goldstein article for New York Magazine. STAY HIGH 149 also participated in early presentations of graffiti art on canvas at Hugo Martinez's United graffiti Artists.
By 1974 STAY HIGH had pretty much retired from writing. After his retirement he was seldom seen and disappeared into obscurity for almost twenty years. In June of 2000 he returned to view with his first public appearance, at The State of the Art Gallery in Brooklyn.
