Craig Costello

Growing up in Queens, New York, Craig Costello (b. 1971, New York), aka KR, saw his hometown’s trains gradually become clean in the 1980s as the city cracked down on subway graffiti. At the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1990s, he studied photography, carrying a Nikon F2 along on his nighttime writing expeditions with local artists Barry McGee, DUG, and others. His graffiti aesthetic was shaped by his New York background, and his emphasis on the simple and quick aspects of graffiti—tags and throw-ups—soon caught on in San Francisco. Especially influential was the gleaming silver ink he created, called Krink, which he put in foam-topped shoe-polish applicators and used instead of a marker. After leaving San Francisco in 1998, he began to package Krink for sale at boutique stores, developing a variety of markers and a range of colors. Using his keen eye for design, Costello began a string of successful co-branded product work with a number of companies both large and small. He also began to work more with his inks in studio and gallery settings as well as to take his street work in new directions, pouring Krink over the curved tops of mailboxes to create a sculptural effect. Influenced by other graffiti artists who had been creating enormous, sloppy, multistory tags by filling fire extinguishers with paint, Costello used fire extinguishers filled with Krink to create largescale, dripping mural works for galleries, museums, and private commissions around the world, coupling graffiti techniques with those of action painting.


Art in the Streets, the first major historical exhibition of graffiti and street art organized by an American museum, surveys the origins and history of the movement in the United States and traces its influence as it spread around the world. Privacy Policy