Pioneering artist Futura 2000: ‘It’s been very improbable, my career’

Multimedia artist Futura 2000’s new career retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts has been decades in the making – and has only come about due to years of intense perseverance. While Futura has reached the heights of his chosen medium, now boasting high-level collaborations with the likes of Virgil Abloh, Uniqlo and Nike, he spent years struggling to break into the art world and build a name for himself. His exhibition, Breaking Out, represents a new milestone and an achievement of validation from the New York art world that has long proved elusive to him.
The artist first began creating work in the early 1970s as a part of the graffiti scene that was flourishing in his home borough of Brooklyn. From the beginning, Futura’s work stood out for its abstraction and sci-fi themes, which the artist has credited to the black and white TV shows and B-movies that he watched as a child and young adult in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The Stanley Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey was a major touchstone that got the artist thinking about space and the future, and he also found inspiration in 1979’s franchise-starter Alien, particularly in how the alien’s form influenced his own cast of characters.
A major early piece for Futura was 1980’s Break, referenced in the title of the new exhibition, in which the artist spray-painted graffiti over an entire subway car. The work, represented in the show through a photograph, is an explosion of bright, cloud-like pastel hues in oranges, reds, mauves and blues. It’s a good orientation as any to Futura’s work, which tends to collage imagery of space rockets, starscapes, alien figures, atoms and planets over backgrounds of oozing, almost biological-feeling runs and seeps of colors.
Futura titled the subway car piece Break because he saw the work as doing just that – breaking from typical motifs of elaboration and lettering that were then considered essential components of graffiti art to pursue abstraction. Looking back, he now regards it as “the genesis of everything”, insofar as his creative efforts go. “When I did Break I was trying to come into this new creative space,” he said.
According to Futura, the piece “ran” for perhaps three months before it was either painted over by other artists or cleaned off by the city. As with the rest of the art he created in those days, Break was ephemeral by definition, and it lives on now only in photos, memories and as an influence in Futura’s later work. Even the train itself no longer exists, and the artist speculated that it may have ended up in the Atlantic Ocean. “They removed all the bad materials that were in subway cars and dumped them in the ocean to create reefs,” he said, citing a 2008 plan to sink about 1,000 decommissioned subway cars off various parts of the east coast. “Maybe it did end up there. That would be kind of cool.”
Futura’s transition into gallery spaces was a challenging one that took him many years to figure out. He experienced significant amounts of rejection throughout the 1980s, and even when he did land prime gallery spots, the art world could be off-putting and hurtful. “At the time I was kind of just angry, because quite frankly I wasn’t succeeding,” he told me. He recalled feelings of exhaustion and exclusion over being nickel-and-dimed out of earnings by galleries, and getting run down by the chase of it all. “It was obviously not for me at the time. I had to go do other things and find another route.”
Things began to substantially turn around for Futura when the French fashion designer Agnès B became a patron of his in the early 1990s; she has continued to support Futura’s work for the past three decades. “At a moment in my life when things weren’t amazing,” he recalled, “she showed interest and helped me get my first real studio. She was someone who wasn’t there to take advantage of me.”
This was around the time the Futura was diversifying into arenas like streetwear and digital files created via computer, although he’s always seen himself at core as a spray painter. He believes one of his key innovations is inverting the spray can, holding it upside down when he works, and sees this as essential to his ability to exert minute control overhis paint application. He also loves to be active on his canvases, draping them with plastic so he can walk over them and embrace the fundamental fluidity and chaos of his medium of choice. “Sometimes there will be a happy accident, a Bob Ross moment where something cool will happen,” he said.
Breaking Out is touted to be the largest retrospective of Futura’s career – in fact, he views it as his first true museum show – and it follows on the heels of a similarly titled show at the University of Buffalo that ran until last winter. This version of the exhibit goes deep into the artist’s history, having received a wealth of loans from private collectors, in order to present a full picture of Futura’s history and development as a creative force.
This is a show that is very much about championing an artist who still is an outsider of sorts, and whom the Bronx Museum contends should be seen alongside other great Black artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, who made a similar transition from graffiti to canvases.
Futura is fully enjoying being involved in planning the retrospective and is ready to savor a major moment of his own in New York. It’s a sign of his resilience, and the fact that somehow, some way, he’s managed to triumph as an artist. “It’s been very improbable, my career, I don’t think I would ever have imagined all this. I think the show is going to be awesome. As I used to say back in the day, we’re gonna rock the house.”