Tats cru biography of donald
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An Interview with TATS Cru, ‘The Mural Kings’
I spent a couple of days with TATS Cru —”The Mural Kings” who began writing (what media would later call “graffiti”) in the South Bronx during the1980s— talking about their origins, gifts and blessings, as well as the act of creation.
Entering The Point felt like walking through a temple. There is something sacred not only about the space, but also the artists: BIO, BG-183 and Nicer.
This is significant, because it explains TATS Cru understanding of their very own gifts and blessings. Thing is there is much conflation about gifts and blessings, and whether or not they are curses (they are not curses). Likewise, there is the “diamond in the rough,” which signifies a hero or king, who must rise in the midst of trying environments. This interview turned into a lesson about transforming “lemons” into proverbial lemonade, as much as it was about being true to one’s self and family.
ORIGINS
TATS Cru began in the South Bronx. Nicer remembered that the Bronx was “a day and age where neighbors parented everybody” and “grandmas with caramels and pennies” would give these treats to the kids who could buy candy with a penny. It was “a time of stickball and johnny-on-the-pony. It wa
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How and Nosm
photographed by Debra Scherer
Artists Raoul and Davide Perré take us on a tour through their world, recalling early days painting trains and becoming muralists with Bronx natives BIO, BG 183, Nicer, Kenn, Raz, Shame 125 and Soze, aka TATS CRU, while reflecting on their development into the fine artists they are today. Just don’t call it street art.
Debra: Thanks for having me here in the studio. So lets talk about how you wound up here in New York?
Nosm: When we started out we were tagging and eventually got into painting trains and painting walls illegally, then it developed into doing legal walls, and then eventually into painting canvases. The media started calling it all graffiti because the graffiti artists started doing murals. We call it muralism or mural paintings, but you know, they gave it the term street art, which, really, I don’t know what that is.
We were born in San Sebastian, that’s the Basque region of Spain, in the north, where we lived for 5 or 6 years until we moved to Germany, where we spent about 17 years. We started doing graffiti in ’88, and at one point we wanted to visit the so called “mecca” of graffiti, New York City, that was in ‘97.
How: Then we came back in ‘98 for a month, then we decided to stay, so w
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Wavy: The TATS Cru: Assimilate their come down words
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