REVOK (b. 1977, Riverside) was raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Riverside, where he began to write graffiti in 1990. As a result of his travels, REVOK became an influential graffiti writer not only in Los Angeles but also in Nashville, Atlanta, and Miami by the time he was twenty years old. In 1997, he was inducted into the influential AWR (All Writes Reserved) and MSK (Mad Society Kings) graffiti crews. Beginning in the late 1990s, while he was briefly living in San Francisco, REVOK’s lettering style began to draw more consciously from the Eastside traditions of Los Angeles cholo writers in a form he calls “cyber-cholo.” One of today’s most widely imitated letter stylists, REVOK has maintained a breakneck pace of painting and travel, executing extremely technical pieces in very illegal contexts worldwide, including locations across the United States and Europe and in China, South Korea, Japan, Canada, and Australia, where his arrest made national news. A specialty of REVOK’s is billboards, painted illegally and at dizzying heights. A 2007 piece he painted with AUGOR on a pink billboard advertising Takashi Murakami’s show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, was quickly removed—Murakami wanted it for his collection.
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