Lady Pink: Miss Subway NYC
18th July, 2025 – Late September 2025
D’Stassi Art, 12–18 Hoxton Street
(Entrance on Drysdale Street)
Shoreditch, London, N1 6NG
Lady Pink returns to her graffiti roots with a recreated New York City subway station and original works in the heart of Shoreditch.
This July, D’Stassi Art presents Miss Subway NYC, a landmark solo exhibition by trailblazing artist Lady Pink, opening 18 July 2025. One of the first women to break into New York’s graffiti scene, Lady Pink returns to where it all began, the subway, with a full-scale recreation of a graffiti-covered NYC subway station inside the gallery, in the heart of Shoreditch. The exhibition features a curated selection of original works by Lady Pink, including new commissions alongside archival pieces, sketches, and ephemera from her early career.
The subway was Lady Pink’s launchpad, classroom, and battleground. “It was a boot camp for artists,” she says. It’s where she built her name, and where she first discovered graffiti at 12, gazing out the window of the elevated train to the Bronx Zoo, stunned by the sight of a full-colour train painted end to end with trees and characters.
Image courtesy of D’Stassi Art
© Lady Pink
Graffiti writers risked their lives for their art. The subway trains were a moving canvas and the bloodstream of the scene. Teenagers competed for space and attention, pushing one another to go bigger, bolder, and better. They rarely visited other stations, but the trains carried their work across the city, fuelling rivalries and inspiration.
Miss Subway NYC pays tribute to that world, capturing the characters who emerged at night while she was painting: saxophonists, the elderly, the homeless. “Those were the people you made it for,” said Lady Pink. “The straphangers.” Born in Ecuador and raised in Queens, Lady Pink (Sandra Fabara) began tagging trains at the age of 15.
At 17, she exhibited at MoMA PS1 in the landmark 1981 show New York/New Wave, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. By then, she was already a fearless force, painting entire subway cars, starring in the hip-hop film Wild Style, and leaving her mark, quite literally, on the scene. She recalls Basquiat asking her to walk barefoot across one of his paintings, so she took off her shoes and left her footprints behind.
The exhibition’s title, Miss Subway NYC, draws inspiration from the long-running New York beauty pageant Miss Subways, which ran from the 1940s through the ’70s. Posters inside train cars featured everyday women, teachers, clerks, aspiring radio producers, alongside bios about their lives and ambitions. Revived in 2020, the pageant has become a celebration of subway culture and self-expression. Today’s contestants, across all gender identities, compete not with looks but with lip-syncs, protest songs, DIY crowns, and full-blown performance art. In Miss Subway NYC, Lady Pink reimagines herself as Miss Subways 2025 in a self-portrait, wearing a sash, recreating Martha Cooper’s iconic photograph of her in a subway car.
Credit Steven Paneccasio
When New York City scrapped its old subway trains, many of which Lady Pink had painted, they were dumped into the ocean to serve as artificial reefs, seen only by scuba divers. Some were bought by private collectors; others were turned into movie sets, homes, or restaurants. This strange afterlife inspired a diptych imagining a post-apocalyptic village, loosely based on Japanese architecture.
The subway was also a significant place for Lady Pink’s family, her husband, Roger Smith, is a former NYC subway operator who was fired just before retirement after the Vandal Squad identified him as a well-known graffiti writer. Their home was raided, and false charges were filed, forcing the couple to leave the city. Over the decades, she’s remained outspoken about censorship, gender bias, and survival in the art world. She continues to mentor younger women artists and create political murals, including a portrait of Kamala Harris urging people to “Vote for Freedom.”
Lady Pink: Miss Subway NYC opens on the 18th of July, 2025 until Late September 2025 at D’Stassi Art
©2025 D’Stassi Art
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