Futura 2020

When I first moved to NYC back in the mid-’90s, Lenny McGurr, was already the most famous graf writer in the city. He was better known as Futura 2000 back then. The street art pioneer started painting on trains way back in the ’70s, in the early days of the city’s graffiti movement. By the ’80s, he’d broken into the gallery scene, exhibiting his artwork alongside the likes of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He’d even toured with The Clash, painting on stage while they performed. In the ’90s, he launched seminal New York streetwear brand Project Dragon and operated the Recon store with fellow graf luminary Stash. He also created a ground-breaking interactive website, designed album covers for James Lavelle’s internationally successful UNKLE music project, and launched a popular series of highly collectible toy collaborations with Japanese brand Medicom. As such, by the turn of the century, Futura had already long been at the forefront of many of the aspects of contemporary culture that I’ve been obsessed with for much of my life. In the decades since, he’s shown his art around the world, and pulled off coveted collaborations with the likes of Nike, Levi’s, Supreme, The North Face, Uniqlo, Louis Vuitton, and BMW, as well as opening his Futura Laboratories shop in Japan. FUTURA: The Artist’s Monograph, fresh out from Rizzoli, documents five decades of artwork by the iconic artist. The appropriately heavyweight hardcover forms a definitive record of Leonard’s early roots, progression, and industry dominance, peppered with rare imagery and personal photos, and backed-up with testimonials by fellow superstar creatives like by Virgil Abloh, Agnès b., Takashi Murakami, NIGO, Lee Quiñones, and others. It’s 256 pages of unbeatable style. One of my favorite elements of this massive monograph is how it starts with his recent work and takes you further back in time as you move forward through the pages. Back to the Futura 2000, so to speak. See, 2020 wasn’t all bad.