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Stash
@mr_stash

Stash


Josh "Stash" Franklin was born on Long Island in 1967 and came of age in the East Village in the early 1980s. His first canvas works were exhibited alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in FUN Gallery's "Graffiti, Thanks-a-Lot!"
His work has since been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Dubai, Singapore and Moscow, and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
STASH is also widely known for incorporating spray nozzles and other graffiti symbolism into its streetwear designs.

Josh “Stash” Franklin was born on Long Island in 1967 and came of age in the East Village in the early 1980's, when his first canvas was shown alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in FUN Gallery's “Graffiti, Thanks a Lot!” .
Stash's work has since been shown in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Dubai, Singapore, and Moscow, and joined the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Stash is also widely known for incorporating spray nozzles and other graffiti iconography in streetwear design.


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His high-profile collaborations in the 1990s with brands such as Nike, Burton, Medicom Toys, and A Bathing Ape® played a key role in helping the public recognize the cultural and aesthetic value of graffiti.

Common to all of Stash's work is the style and spirit of 1980s New York City subway graffiti; earlier works incorporate subway maps and "Wild Style" lettering. Stash's more recent work is abstract, and his references to his counterculture origins are more metaphorical than explicit.
Behind the bold colors and lines in the painting's foreground, painted-over fragments of previous works can be seen, symbolizing the layered nature of subway cars being graffitied and painted by graffiti artists, cleaned up by the transit authority, then graffitied and painted again. Stash portrays partially concealed memories of individual and collective pasts through incomplete adaptations.

His high-profile collaborations with Nike, Burton, Medicom Toy, A Bathing Ape®, and other brands during the 1990s played a key role in the general public's eventual appreciation of graffiti's cultural and aesthetic value.

The through-line in all of Stash's work is the style and ethos of 1980's NYC subway graffiti. His earlier paintings incorporate subway maps and “Wild Style” lettering. Stash's more recent paintings are abstract; their references to his origin in a counterculture are metaphorical rather than explicit. Fragments of earlier pieces since painted over can be seen behind the bold colors and linework in the foreground of the painting, figuring the palimpsestic nature of subway cars that were tagged and painted by graffiti artists, buffed clean by the transit authority, and tagged and painted again. Stash paints his memory of a personal and collective past that remains partially obscured by imperfect retellings.



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Stash
@mr_stash