Soul Artist

Marc "Ali" Edmonds

March 30, 2022 - June 28, 2023

at Anibal Aviles Playground
111 W 108th Street,
between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenue

Marc André Edmonds aka ALI was born in Manhattan in 1956 to an African-American father and Seneca mother, Charyl Edmonds Romo. Charyl is noteworthy in her own right as a prominent leader of the sweat-equity homesteading movement that created affordable co-ops throughout the 1970’s. The building they lived in on Columbus Avenue was a significant center for the evolving forms of art of the time. Edmonds’ role as a visionary helped to support his fellow explorers, and his “precocious” mind is evident in his humor, paintings and music. He attended public school on the Upper West Side with future noted graffiti artists SAMO (Jean-Michel Basquiat), Futura 2000 (Lenny McGurr), and COCA 82 (Pablo Calogero).

He began street-tagging as “ALI” in 1970 and, with his younger brother Michael, founded the early crew The Underground. He went on to found The Soul Artists several years later, using the storefront on Columbus Avenue as a base for the exploration of graffiti as a more elevated “legitimate” art form. The storefront was used as a workshop for painting signs as part of a legal city beautification project, that “held weekly Monday night meetings that were regularly attended by graffiti writers, journalists, activists and the otherwise curious”.

Because of these meetings, the storefront space became a hub for writers and a way for a creative community to interact. Major writers like IZ The Wiz, Eric Haze and Leonard McGurr aka Futura were regulars at the studio. The connection to “downtown” artists like Haring was thanks to Fred Brathwaite aka Fab 5 Freddy, whom Haze, an early member of the Soul Artists, describes as “a key link to the downtown art world”.

In the winter of 1980/1981, the connections being made at the Soul Artists studio began to pay off for a core group of artists, including Haze, Quiñones, McGurr, Lady Pink, Zephyr and Brathwaite. They were showed at the Mudd Club and PS1, and were featured in a cover article in The Village Voice about graffiti. Without the Soul Artists, many of those opportunities might not have arisen.

ALI became a respected subway artist well before the advent of “wildstyle” graffiti art. His works often contained a humorous political message, a trend which led to his establishing and publishing the comic-oriented “Zoo York Magazine” in the early 1980s. The premier issue was first published in May 1979. In 1981, Edmonds recorded an international hit, ”Shoot the Pump”, with his group "Johnny Walter Negro and the loose Joints “. The name, Johnny Walter Negro, was a play on the famous J. Walter Thompson ad agency. In 1990 He moved to Tucson. Edmonds passed away in Arizona in 1994.

from YouTube: @soulwalking56

Edmonds’ work stands as an important example of the creative heritage of the Manhattan Valley in both its urbanism and diversity. The work shows the humor, political awareness, and the dreams of a burgeoning artist at a time when creativity was finding new and exciting mediums of expression.