He Gets Down With His Bad Self

Street scribblers like Shepard Fairey, Banksy, and Swoon have Lee Quiñones to thank in part for their methods and media. Though not a household name like Haring or Basquiat, Quiñones was one of the first to quite literally take it to the streets; he has made downtown nooks and subway cars more interesting to look at since the mid-seventies. Expansions is from Quiñones’s mid-nineties series “Prelude,� up at P.S.1 through September 24. The artist might have shifted from the streets to the studio, but the graffiti aesthetic is still ever-present in his work. These particular paintings are inspired by the seventies-era funk and break-beat sounds that ultimately provided the rhythmic foundation for hip-hop, not to mention this dude’s funkier-than-thou attitude. —Rachel Wolff