The piece book of Edwin "HE"

Artist Edwin "HE"

Manufacturer Alden Paper Co., Inc.

Datec. 1979

Mediumink; paper (fiber product)

DimensionsOverall (HWD): 9 1/2 × 7 1/16 in. (24.13 × 17.939 cm)

Credit LineMoPOP permanent collection

Object number1999.132.5

Text Entries

Portal Description

Photojournalist and anthropologist Martha Cooper was given this piece book that belonged to Edwin “HE”, a young graffiti writer in New York City, at the time she took Edwin’s photo. A piece book is a graffiti writer’s sketchbook, in which the writer keeps original outlines for “pieces,” a term derived from "masterpiece," which usually refers to the painting of a writer’s graffiti name on the side of a subway car. In addition to such sketches, writers also collect the signatures or “tags” of other writers in their piece books and try to get the most famous writers to sign their books.

On one of the pages of this piece book, Edwin had created an outline of a “windows-up top-to-bottom,” a painting that covers one side of a subway car from top to bottom, including the windows. The outline shows his plan to add the tags of his crew, The Ave C Boys 1, on the car. Another outline from the piece book is a design for a piece of the graffiti name Wil. It shows a cartoon character whose head and torso are comprised of a spray can that is spraying up the design. Spray can characters like this one and other spray can imagery is common in graffiti art. In this Wil piece design, a crown also tops one of the letters. The crown is another common image often incorporated into tags and pieces and symbolizes a writer’s ultimate goal to become “king.” By becoming a king, a writer claims territorial rights over a subway line or other property by having more tags and pieces up than anyone else

Physical Description

Hand drawn picture of a subway with HE graffiti tag and sketches done by original artist in red, black and purple ink.

CopyrightThis work is issued under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License. For more information, go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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