Art

New York, America and broken promises in the work of John Fekner

In Reggio Emilia, the first solo exhibition in Italy of the pioneer of 'stencil art' and author of 'graffiti guerrilla'.

15 July 2025

2' min read

John Fekner and New York, New York and John Fekner. The protest can be read, everywhere. HisWarning Signs were in every borough of the city, a shared symbol of social denunciation, in places forgotten by the administration, in communities abandoned by the American government, messages that today more than ever resonate relevant and necessary, messages that have become global..

A shy artist allergic to presidentialism, focused on his message and not on his own recognisability, he was a protagonist, together with Keith Haring, Andy Warhol and Jenny Holzer, of the revolutionary urban art scene between the 1970s and 1980s.

The exhibition BROKEN PROMISES, Broken Promises, set up at SPAZIOC21, in collaboration with Match Gallery and the MGML museum in Ljubliana, dedicated to the pioneer of stencil art, traces Fekner's intense and extensive production through a selection of works-symbols of his battle and of his conceptual-environmentalist art in which dates, words, stencils on streets, buildings, cars, from Queens to the Bronx and Manhattan, but also Toronto, Washington, all the way to Sweden, have become an integral part of the places that have hosted them.

Industrial Fossil, Queens, NY, USA, 1978, Courtesy John Fekner Archive

The City of New York

The unfulfilled promises, the betrayed ideals, Fekner becomes a spokesman for the demands of his time, which, starting from his city, become symbols of a shared and global social complaint. Fekner's work in the city of New York began very early, as early as high school, to evolve over the years, expanding and growing, even in the size of the works, becoming part of the metropolitan architecture and part of the communities. Fekner's work succeeds in instinctively engaging residents and becomes a megaphone to demand changes and reactions from institutions. Neighbourhood kids become his improvised assistants and the aforementioned Warning Signs enter the American common language as a definition of urban stencil art projects, his denunciations expanding beyond the city limits and the United States itself.

Each of Fekner's works reiterates the artist's interest in and concern for the reality that American society began to experience in the late 1970s and early 1980s - urban decay, toxic waste, the threat of mass media, advertisements and the plight of Native Americans.

John Fekner, la mostra a Reggio Emilia
Photogallery8 foto

While it is true that the artist's work in the public space is predominantly conceptual and connected to the use of words, it is evident that it needs to cross the different artistic disciplines moving freely between poetry, music, painting, performance and digital video.

The selected overview of sixty years of artistic practice in the exhibition reveals the motivations and energy that fuelled New York's urban art scene up to the 1990s, a context that simultaneously saw the emergence of graffiti, hip hop and underground video art now considered mainstream, but at the time still only a rebel cry in the midst of decay.