Claw Money is fresh off the street
Born-and-bred New Yorker Claw is something of a graffiti legend. Not only did she throw up her signature three-nailed claw across the most dangerous parts of the city throughout the nineties, but, well, she’s a she.
This may not be a big deal today, but twenty years ago the spray can world was very much a male one. To get her name known, she and fellow graf girl Miss 17 would hit so-called ‘Jock Spots’ – places no one would dare paint, proving that she could more than equal her peers. “The desire to paint was stronger than the fear factor, or we would never have gotten up,” she says. “I drive by some of these spots and often think how things could have gone badly. We are some tough chicks, so we are ready – at least in our minds – for anything.”
Now she’s moved away from the throw-ups and is discovering a new creative outlet with her own couture label, ‘Claw Money’. Clearly, there’s something of a kick to be had from seeing people wearing your designs rather than just looking at them on brickwork: “T-shirts are the new billboard. And people pay money for them – double whammy! You can’t subsist illegally if you want to really grow as a person and an artist, so I had to evolve into something legit. If I could I would be in the tunnels right now painting a masterpiece almost no one would ever see. But, alas, I have bills…”
And it’s not going to stop at clothing. Though still hush-hush, Claw professes to have some surprises in the pipeline. Add to that her work as fashion director of the Shepherd Fairey-founded Swindle magazine and countless collaborations with brands such as Nike (see video below) and Calvin Klein, and Claw Money – the person and the artist – is definitely legit. (Or an integral part of the system - but aren’t we all?)
So now she has the city in the palm of her paw, one question remains: what’s better – New York City today, or the New York City that let her jump fences in the nineties? It’s a no-brainer: “The 1990s hands down! That was a time when real New Yorkers lived in NYC, there was grime and grit, hip hop was an underground NYC secret and living here was affordable. Ahhh, the good old days.”
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Claw Money is fresh off the street (text) by Josh Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK License.
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