Graffiti bridge


How KEO took to painting the town


By CELIA McGEE
DAILY NEWS FEATURE WRITER


Under his nom-de-graffiti, KEO, otherwise known as Blake Lethem, did the backdrop for the recent New York rally of Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean. It ­especially ­outraged Republicans.

"Maybe in your world, ­graffiti ­vandals are artists," Councilman James Oddo (R-S.I.) fired off in a ­letter to the Dean campaign. "In New York City - and in the real world - they are criminals..."

The vandal in question is almost as unusual a mix as Daggett, his large, friendly half-Akita, half-German shepherd who lingers by the front gate of Lethem's East Village building watching the world of Second Ave. go by.

Like a character out of Brooklyn writer Jonathan Lethem's hot new novel, "The Fortress of Solitude," KEO's a 36-year-old white guy living in what tends to be defined as a young black man's world. Jonathan is his ­older brother.

Now a show Blake Lethem and several members of his crew held in SoHo earlier this month has gone up on Pseudo.com in the out-there Web site's first online art sale.

Such hip-hop nation celebrities as Lee Quinones, Charlie Ahearn, Bob­bito Garcia and deejay EMZ showed up for the all-night opening.

"[Racial] distinctions are more and more meaningless," he says. "Pretty soon everyone is going to be a mix of this and that." For Lethem, "tagging" was the ­earliest confirmation of that attitude.

His artist parents moved to Brooklyn's predominantly black and devastated Gowanus neighborhood when the Lethem boys and their younger sister were very young, "and I was the only little white kid in my class. I wore glasses. I wasn't good at sports. I wasn't a great fighter.

"I saw that graffiti artists had their own group, and it crossed cultural boundaries, different backgrounds and neighborhoods," he says.

"You didn't see that at the time - there were gangs that were black, gangs that were Puerto Rican, and so on. Graffiti really was a unifying force. I got down with a crew."

He was 11.

They snuck into the MTA rail yards at night, "whole-carring" subways in lay-up that they could proudly watch roll by on the elevated tracks outside their windows by day.

Those days of bombing are over for Lethem, who combines his paintings with commercial work for album covers and print ads, and lives in bohemian comfort with his girlfriend, ­Elinor ­Tatum, editor and publisher of The Amsterdam News.

But his "Dead Gorgeous" recovers his memories of them. Painted, like all his pieces, on found metal or old streets signs, it's partly a map covered with such evocative names as Pitkin Yard, Livonia Yard New Lots, Louis H. Pink Houses and Creedmoor State Hospital.

"I wish I had room for the Brooklyn House of Detention," he says. "That played a big role in our lives."

"Bad Meaning Bad" is a tribute to Jam Master Jay.

A much larger undertaking is the mural he's helping spray king James Top (also in the Pseudo.com show) ­finish on the wall of an abandoned school on 147th St. and Frederick Douglass Blvd.

"We do [a mural] there every year," he says. "This year it's portraits of great black leaders - like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Martin ­Luther King."

"If it inspires just one kid to go home and ask about them," he says, "we've done our job."

Originally published on September 26, 2003