All posts tagged: Ruyzdael Publishing

TRIPL / Repainting Subway Art: The Most Audacious Graffiti Homage in a Generation

TRIPL / Repainting Subway Art: The Most Audacious Graffiti Homage in a Generation

July 21, 2026 ,

When you consider the time, talent, commitment, and sheer nerve required to create Repainting Subway Art, you hope that, at least once in your life, you have been as thoroughly possessed by an idea as Tripl, a.k.a. Furious. To undertake something on this scale requires the devotion of a monk, the discipline of an archivist, and the alertness of someone who knows that a light may flick on suddenly, a train may move, or a security guard may appear at any moment. What began as a joke in 2013 somehow became an obligation, then an expedition, then ten years of returning to the same nearly impossible proposition: repaint every work in Subway Art, photograph it, restage its scenes, and somehow make the whole unwieldy puzzle hold together.

TRIPL. REPAINTING SUBWAY ART. Tripl a.k.a Furious. Ryuzdael Publishing. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. December 2024.

The original 1984 book by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant has been carried across continents in backpacks, studied in bedrooms, circulated in photocopies, and worn ragged from repeated use. According to long-standing graffiti lore, more than a few copies were also “borrowed” from bookshops and libraries and never found their way back. Its photographs are inscribed in the visual memory of generations of writers, many of whom still name it as the first door that opened onto a life of nocturnal reconnaissance, railway yards, letterforms, and paint. Writing about the project in Nuart Journal, Dutch author and researcher Daniël de Jongh notes that Subway Art is commonly called “the Bible of Graffiti”; the phrase conveys its stature, but perhaps not the intimacy with which people have lived beside it. For many, it was less a commandment than an internal map.

Tripl did not merely borrow its compositions or repaint a selection of celebrated pieces. Working principally on trains in the Netherlands, he recreated all 239 individual works pictured in the original, repeatedly translating the names into TRIPL, FURIOUS, and related aliases while entering the styles, proportions, gestures, humor, and visual decisions of the earlier writers. Dutch train cars were often substantially larger than their New York counterparts, requiring changes of scale, thousands of cans, carefully arranged bags of paint, advance sketches, nights in railway yards, and hurried returns by daylight to document the work before it was cleaned. In that respect, his routine echoed part of Cooper’s own: getting up early, tracking newly painted trains, and trying to make the photograph before the buff erased the evidence.

Painting the trains was only part of the assignment he had set for himself. Tripl also pursued the photographs—the angles, clothing, backgrounds, passengers, poses, interiors, and accidents of place that gave Cooper and Chalfant’s original images their documentary force. He impersonated writers, police officers, commuters, and children; tracked down period-appropriate objects; and sometimes repainted completed works simply because the first photograph was not good enough. Martha Cooper eventually participated in several of these reenactments herself, photographing Tripl in scenes that echoed her pictures of Dondi White and Henry Chalfant.

The resulting book is not a facsimile, although its dependence on the architecture of the earlier volume is central to its conceit. The substitutions, updated details, altered names, changes of country, and movement across four decades make it a reply written in paint, risk, repetition, and stolen hours. Tripl does not answer Subway Art from a desk. He answers it in railway yards, inside an operating train system, under pressure, by submitting himself to some of the scale, uncertainty, and impermanence that shaped the original work—and sometimes answering it with humor. An anti-Koch message becomes an anti-Trump message; a newspaper-reading passenger becomes a woman looking at a smartphone; old declarations receive new answers. Tripl preserves the visual scaffolding while allowing the present to enter through the seams.

At 196 pages and 371 illustrations, Repainting Subway Art is considerably larger than the book it answers. Its additional space accommodates working images, unsuccessful attempts, reconstructed scenes, new writing, and interviews with Tripl and Martha Cooper. Rather than presenting ten years of activity as a seamless triumph, the volume allows the labor to remain visible: the planning, repetition, improvisation, missed photographs, repainted trains, accumulated materials, and improbable persistence required to carry the project across the finish line.

It is easy to admire the project simply as an endurance feat, but the book becomes more interesting when considered as a form of historical participation. Tripl could not preserve the original works; those painted trains disappeared long ago. He subjected himself instead to a version of their circumstances—speed, secrecy, scale, uncertainty, and the necessity of documentation—and then carried the resulting evidence back into print. Repainting Subway Art is homage, reply, performance, open reinterpretation, and a decade-long refusal to let the idea go. Even after the trains have been cleaned and the nights themselves have disappeared, the evidence remains: someone actually did all of this.

Selected exhibitions and events

  • MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, Netherlands
    June 10–August 27, 2023. Curated by Jasper van Es. Martha Cooper joined Tripl during the exhibition for a screening of Martha: A Picture Story and a public discussion.
  • Leicester Museum & Art Gallery, Leicester, United Kingdom
    February 3–May 27, 2024. Presented in association with Bring the Paint.
  • Colab Gallery, Weil am Rhein, Germany
    June 10–November 2, 2024, as part of the group exhibition Patience.
  • Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany
    January 17–March 1, 2025. The exhibition, curated by Jasper van Es, opened with a book signing on January 17.
  • Museum of the City of New York, New York City
    April 4, 2025, at 6:30 p.m. Tripl appeared with Martha Cooper, Henry Chalfant, and John “Crash” Matos for Repainting Subway Art: From NYC to Amsterdam. Moderated by graffiti scholar Edward Birzin, the conversation examined the evolution and international reach of graffiti, the continuing influence of Subway Art, and Tripl’s decade-long response to it.
  • WallWorks New York, Bronx, New York
    A companion exhibition featuring work by Tripl opened April 5, 2025, following the Museum of the City of New York program.

Book details

Produced with support from the Mondriaan Fund

Repainting Subway Art — Tripl a.k.a. Furious

Published by Ruyzdael Publishing, Amsterdam

Publication date: December 19, 2024

196 pages

371 illustrations

Paperback, 21 × 27.5 cm

ISBN: 978-90-833493-2-9

Authors: Tripl/Furious, Edward Birzin, and Mikel van den Boogaard

Editor: Ferry van Zijderveld

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A Working Object: Shoe’s Black Book (1985–1987)

A Working Object: Shoe’s Black Book (1985–1987)

April 30, 2026 , ,

With its smooth-to-the-touch pages and oversized, flapping format, this Black Book is a working object—a collection of shared memories stabilized just enough to be shared. Not quite a memoir, Shoe’s Black Book sits somewhere between a journal, a field manual, a scrapbook, and a massive piece of evidence of one guy’s path—specifically a tight window between 1985 and 1987, when everything was still forming. Pulled together from the remains of an actual collection device, it reads as an artifact that was never meant to be read cleanly, now presented with enough framing to make it legible without smoothing its rough edges.

Niels Shoe Meulman. SHOE’S BLACK BOOK: Graffiti in the 1980’s. Ruyzdael Publishing (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

The contents move like much graffitied memory does: not chronologically, not cleanly, but by association. A Montessori school reference sits not far from a story about racking paint; a meeting with Dondi in a hotel room opens into a muddy anecdote about losing that same drawing under a bridge; a Munich S-Bahn throw-up becomes a gateway into prison, Polaroids, and the unwritten rules of not confessing. Techniques appear in passing—line weight, tool precision, color choices—alongside notes about locations, near-misses, and the quiet passing of knowledge “mouth-to-mouth and hand-to-hand.” Shoe accumulates rather than overexplains, cataloging encounters, rushes of adrenaline, disappointment, styles, influences, and a thousand small turning points—without insisting on hierarchy.

Like most people’s black books, that accumulation is the point. Your blank volume gradually fills, accompanying the writer not as a finished object but as a constant companion—something to carry, to show, to trade, to lose, to recover. It absorbs time and is battered by it. Influence becomes visible in real time: a handstyle shifts after meeting someone, a logo gets reworked into something personal, an “S” becomes a problem to solve repeatedly, and possibly worship. Shoe gradually reveals the obsessive nature of this process—the fixation on color, style, and technique, and the thrill of cat-and-mouse with the cops. Now the obsession reads less as nostalgia than as a working condition and a possible formation of character.

The identity keeps shifting: vandal, decorator, designer. Shoe pushes back on the soft language applied to graffiti early on—“Oh, such nice colors”—with the blunt assertion of VANDALISM, and later reflects on the terminology with pragmatic clarity: “What all graffiti writers have in common is their GSD (Get Shit Done) and DIY (Destroy It Yourself) mentality.” It’s a useful correction. The book doesn’t present graffiti as an aesthetic category first, but as a behavior and connective culture—repetitive, driven, and often indifferent to how it is received. This collection, though, doesn’t feel indifferent. It has been gathered, protected, and now carefully presented—suggesting that even the most committed posture of not caring has always carried an awareness of being seen.

What gives this particular black book additional weight is not only who passes through it—Dondi, Haring, Angel, Bando—but how those encounters are recorded. Shoe doesn’t pitch them all as monumental events, but as moments: a drawing made casually in a hotel room, later water-damaged and forgotten; a nickname given; a lesson absorbed. Carlo McCormick frames this well in his introductory essay, calling it “a travelogue, scrapbook, sketchpad, and diary” that doubles as “a book-shaped treasure chest of memories.” The book never resolves into one thing. It remains plural. Each spread pairs original pages with later notes and images, reinforcing that split between what happened and how it’s remembered.

This is also a constructed narrative. Pages were lost, removed, damaged, returned—some literally cut out and resurfacing years later in places like Christie’s. The decision to unbind the original and treat each page as an individual work shifts the object again, from private tool to displayable archive. Memory fills in gaps; certain stories get sharper over time. The theft itself marks a break—pushing him, at least for a time, out of graffiti and into design. McCormick’s aside—that when a veteran tells these stories “you can be sure they’re full of shit, but… it’s solid gold”—isn’t dismissive so much as accurate, and told with a certain pathos. This is lived history, shaped in the telling.

What emerges is not a definitive account of a scene but a close-range view of how one forms—through repetition, proximity, and exchange. Amsterdam and New York fold into each other here, not as competing origin stories but as Shoe’s overlapping circuits. The book shows how styles move, how ideas travel, and how a localized practice becomes something shared across cities. Intelligence and aspiration pass through pages like these—handled, carried, traded, sometimes stolen, sometimes returned.

For someone unfamiliar with why a black book matters, this one answers without overexplaining. Here is the process before it is resolved, the work before it is framed, the evidence before the story hardens around it. Shoe’s Black Book is not simply a record of what graffiti became. It shows how it moved and how it was bound before anyone decided what it was worth.

Niels Shoe Meulman. SHOE’S BLACK BOOK: Graffiti in the 1980’s.

Ruyzdael Publishing. Amsterdam, Netherlands. December 2025.

Authors: Niels Shoe Meulman, Carlo McCormick

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