At Manhattan street muralist James De La Vega's storefront gallery in the East Village, the hipsters clutch at T-shirts bearing his doodles and drawings—a scene slightly at odds with De La Vega's image as the renegade graffitist the New York Times once called "a hybrid between a street kid and an Ivy League-educated guerrilla performance artist."
De La Vega thrives on such contradictions. He believes that a chalk drawing on the sidewalk or a painting on a block of concrete or brick wall is as worthy of the mantle of art as a formal work on canvas. The New York Police Department doesn't always agree and has arrested De La Vega more than once for vandalism. But Christie's auction house has sold his art for thousands of dollars, and many see him as an inspired cultural figure.
"He's an outstanding artist," says LeRoy Neiman, one of America's most popular sports painters, who has served as a mentor of sorts to De La Vega. "I have quite a few people come up out of the blue and show their work. And his was outstanding. I allowed myself to become familiar with it, and the development was phenomenal."
Now 35, De La Vega began his street career in the early 1990s with a series of wall paintings of Latino men and women, in a celebration of his Puerto Rican heritage. Soon the signature "DE LA VEGA" began to appear beneath the drawings, along with such aphorisms as "Be Mindful Even If Your Mind Is Full."
"I like the idea of the artist going out in the world and creating a dialogue," says De La Vega. "So I try to write something I think people need to hear, or rehear. Something to make them think, to be in that moment. Maybe it changes their day. Maybe they don't think twice about it. For some people, it's a confrontation. But I think for most, it reassures them—it gives them something to reflect on. Art is interacting with people."
De La Vega was born and raised in Spanish, or East, Harlem, where he still lives with his mother, Elsie Matos, who works in the office of a local school. His father, Jaime, ran several neighborhood businesses, including a restaurant and a hardware store, before he died in 1989 of AIDS.
De La Vega earned a scholarship to York Preparatory School, and, later, to the fine arts program at Cornell University. "I knew as early as my freshman year that I wanted to be an artist," he says. "I just didn't know what I'd be doing." After graduating from Cornell in 1994, he divided his time between teaching Puerto Rican history at Central Park East, a secondary school, and his street art, which led to his run-ins with the law. The artist turned the arrests to his advantage, garnering publicity by printing up "Free De La Vega" T-shirts. He was sentenced to 50 hours of community service.
In 1998, as the neighborhood was beginning to gentrify, De La Vega opened a workshop and storefront on Lexington Avenue in Spanish Harlem. Before long, some of his street aphorisms—"The Rich Control the Destiny of the Poor, But an Intelligent Man Controls His Own"—began to rankle the newcomers. "One time I was out with my chalk," he says resignedly, "and I hadn't even started drawing, and all of these cop cars started pulling up. Never mind that chalk just washes away." So in 2005, when he lost the lease for his store to a hot-dog chain willing to pay a higher rent, De La Vega moved his operation to the East Village.
