Christopher Lee, born in New York City in 1962, has been a vibrant figure in the New York and Washington DC art scenes for over 30 years. An alum of Rhode Island School of Design, his work is characterized by a unique blend of facile line work and bold color sense, addressing contemporary art and politics. Lee's art reflects a deep engagement with black voices in pop culture and the arts, drawing from an early love of comic books through to a celebration of the black aesthetic’s mainstream acceptance today, influenced by icons like Basquiat and Hip Hop legends.Lee’s diverse body of work spans graffiti art, where text becomes a pivotal visual device, to drawings and silkscreen projects that challenge viewers' perceptions through complex compositions and the concept of "double vision." His career, marked by solo and group exhibitions, curatorial projects, and significant participations in art fairs, underscores his commitment to exploring racial identity and the dynamics of visual language, making his pieces a compelling narrative of cultural evolution and liberation.RESUMEChristopher Lee, born 1962 in New York City, has exhibited in the New York and DC art worlds for over 30 years. His drawings and paintings combine facile line work and bold color sense to access topical issues of contemporary art and politics. An alum of Rhode Island School of Design, he likes to explore the hybrid nexus of the classical canon with the urgency of urban zeitgeist. NYC/Long Island: 1984 Group Show, Area Nightclub, NYC1988 Solo Show, Ward/Nasse Gallery, NYC1990 Solo Show, Riverhead Arts Council, Riverhead, NY1992 Group Show, La Salle Military Academy, Islip, NY1992 Group Show, Renee Dahl Gallery, East Quogue, NY1997/98 Christie’s Employee Show, NYC2008 Solo Show “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”, Windows Gallery, NYC2009 “The Facebook Show”, Purchase University, Purchase, NY2009 Curated “Zeitgeist 2009”, Artomat Gallery, NYC2010 Guillermo Creus’ “Bushwick Schlacht”, Bushwick, NY2011 CCCP Gallery “Business Poems”2014 Bushwick Open Studios2017 Palette Gallery, Asbury Park2020 Palette Gallery Online Solo Show2021 Cologne Art Fair/ Julian Sander Gallery Washington DC: 2001 DCAC Wall Mountables2002 Art-o-Matic2004 Transformer Emerging Artists2005 Warehouse Art Gallery Group Show2012 DC Arts Studios Member Shows Christopher Lee's career spans thirty years of engagement with both the New York and Washington DC art scenes, through solo and group exhibitions, curatorial projects, and participation in art fairs and studio events. His work explores a dynamic range of themes, often intersecting contemporary political discourse with personal expression. Artist’s Statement:Black voices in contemporary art, pop culture, and the schoolboy's canon... These are my themes. Our current age is experiencing an explosion and liberation of black voices in the visual arts. My story arc is similar to many black artists today. I started off with an affinity for comic book adventure stories which collided with the western canon and Eurocentric visual language in grade school and college. The black figure was marginal and/or invisible. The 1980s and 1990s gave us Basquiat, Hip Hop's Russell Simmons and P-Diddy. Today, the black aesthetic is mainstream and saturates the contemporary art market.Graffiti Art:Text and the written word are visual devices in many of my works. The “Heavy Metal” paintings are on aluminum where I've worked spray-painted “tags” from NYC 1970s graffiti culture. My Basquiat Panels use stenciled quotes from sources such as Marcel Broodthaers, Pop songs, real estate ads, Art History books, etc.Drawings:I’m interested in what people see when they look at a picture a second time. My drawings hopefully reward repeat viewings by having slightly obtuse compositions, juxtapositions, and meanings.Silkscreening:Warhol, Richard Prince, and Sigmar Polke are inspirations to me. The concept of “double vision” plays a large part in my silkscreen projects. To see an image repeated so much that its ordinary meaning either disappears or becomes a formal visual element. Chris Lee: On Mark-Making as Spectacle"Were art to redeem man, it would do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes young goats frisk at the edge of the grove. All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world." --José Ortega y Gasset, from The Dehumanization of Art I was born a po' black child in Harlem in 1962. I started drawing at a very young age. Cartoon characters from TV were my subject. As an adolescent, I fell in love with comic books and THAT became my subject matter. I was something of a child prodigy and was suggested for an affirmative action program in Manhattan's private school system. After some searching, I was accepted into the expensive, exclusive, and mostly white Dalton School on a substantial scholarship subsidy. That's where I was introduced to the more serious canon of Western Art History and also to the power and prestige of the contemporary art market. I was accepted at Dalton as still a prodigy savant. I remember going to friends' Park and Fifth Avenue apartments and seeing first-rate collections. The publisher Mort Janklow pulled me in front of a Jim Dine painting he had purchased and tells me, cigar in hand, that he paid a hundred thousand dollars for that painting. "Gee, that's a nice way to make a living," I thought. You know... easy money. After Dalton, in 1980, I was accepted into the Rhode Island School of Design. I was eighteen years old. RISD was like a summer camp art colony to me. I was a terrible student but a party boy extraordinaire. I was the king of the dance floor and could throw down the cheap beer like nobody's business. Around this time, the New York art world was percolating with activity. Artists like Julian Schnabel, Jörg Immendorff, James Brown, Sandro Chia, Raymond Pettibon, Keith Haring, and, of course, Jean-Michel Basquiat made artmaking LOOK easy. They also made academic training seem superfluous. I dropped out of RISD in 1983. It would be the biggest mistake of my life. I moved back to New York in the mid- '80s. The stock market was off the charts and the art market bubble of that period was in full effect. I thought I would be one of the lucky ones who would go from adolescent doodles and dabbles to art star overnight. But that didn't happen. I did embrace the NYC downtown scene, but the people who had made all that noise were on average about ten years older than me. By the time I arrived, the party was winding down. Rents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan were rising, and both the stock and the art markets were heading for disaster. Neither Basquiat nor Haring would make it out of the decade alive. I joined the Coast Guard in 1987, to get discipline and move out of my mom's house. I had read somewhere that Robert Rauschenberg had been in the Navy, so it seemed a "fit." They sent me to the Hamptons. In the Coast Guard, I was mostly on dry land as an electronics technician. I would often see people like Henry Geldzahler, Larry Rivers, Ross Bleckner, and Eric Fischl casually and informally going about their day-to-day lives there. My art world fantasies were reignited. As it turned out, the Coast Guard wasn't for me. After my four years were up, I went back to civilian life. The mid-'90s would see a resurgence in the art world, the art market, and Wall Street. By now, MY generation was making its presence felt. The "Young British Artists" were injecting some much-needed humor and allure into the New York scene. The Chelsea neighborhood had replaced the Lower East Side and SoHo as the center of gravity for contemporary art. Matthew Marks opened a couple of galleries in Chelsea. He was a schoolmate of mine, and his model became the Chelsea model. His artists — Roni Horn, Gary Hume, and Ellsworth Kelly — represented the epitome of cool minimalism. Chelsea art was flat, highly produced, and condo-ready. This art world quickly passed me by as well, in part because MEAs and MBAs (neither of which degrees I had) went hand in hand in the new milieu. After the Millennium, I left New York for Washington, D.C., where I could better afford studio space. Now in my forties, I was beginning to settle into a bit more maturity and commitment in my studio practice. I had come out of the previous two decades with a decided disposition: silkscreen and mark-making were my language. In *The Shock of the New*, the critic Robert Hughes makes a distinction between a "painting" and a "sign." And here's the POINT for me: I am a sucker for the media-savvy art generation of the 1980s and '90s — the people who catapulted Warhol and Basquiat to icon status. I guess mine is a cautionary tale. We are the people who can't be bothered with labor-intensive academic painting or with "sincerity." We want to take it or leave it with a quick hit, Quixotic "gesture." My art is silkscreen-based, referential to pop culture, art as spectacle — basic colors straight out of the tube painting, etc. I am an "art person" interested in the "art world"... my pieces are quickly made convulsions, leaving time to get out and hit the openings and after parties. As the genius Sistine Chapel master, Michelangelo Buonarroti said: "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke."