The artwork, which depicts a posh young schoolboy spray-painting the phrase “Ghetto 4 Life” while a butler holds a tray of spray cans, was removed from the Melrose building at 651 Elton Avenue as part of the structure’s demolition to make space for a charter school.

The relocation of the mural, part of Banksy’s “Better Out Than In” residency in New York in October 2013, has stirred strong emotions among Bronx locals, with many lamenting the loss of a piece considered a source of community pride.

“Everybody was crying around here. This is art,” Steve Jacob told The New York Post. “The gentleman made it for us, the community. I’ve lived all my life in the Bronx, and this was made for the Bronx people. And now someone’s taken it away from us.”

Despite the efforts of the building’s owner, David Damaghi, to keep the mural within New York City, including offers to local schools and institutions like MoMA, it was ultimately decided to relocate it to 800 Union Avenue in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which the New York Daily News identified as owned by Kiumarz Geula of Pillar Property Management.

In a 2015 interview with The Guardian, Banksy said he didn’t think much about when his tags and murals are removed, “but for the art form as a whole it’s unhealthy. When you paint illegally you have so much to contend with—cameras, cops, Neighborhood Watch, drunk people throwing bottles at your head—so adding “predatory art speculators” to the mix just makes things even harder.”

A representative of Fine Art Shippers, who were hired to transport the work, told ARTnews the move to Bridgeport is temporary. “It is uncertain whether it will be sold or moved again in the future.”

Despite Banksy tagging buildings across the globe, some of which lead to million dollar sales of buildings and the removal of the murals, his true identity remains a mystery. A recently unearthed BBC interview from 2003 identified him as an artist named Robert Banks, however, there are other theories.

The recent absence of Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, from the public eye following a reported abdominal surgery has led to a deluge of conspiracy theories. On February 27, X user @LMAsaysno posted “not a single banksy since kate middleton disappeared. coincidence?”

The day he posted that second video, Rodriguez told his grandmother, with whom he lived at the time in an apartment in the South Bronx, that he knew his life was going to change. Now, it has. 

Just a year later Rodriguez signed with United Talent Agency (UTA), and this September, the artist, who doesn’t have gallery representation or a dealer in any traditional sense, will have his first solo show at UTA Artist Space’s pop-up gallery in Chelsea.

UTA represents some of the most recognizable names in media and entertainment: Harrison Ford, Chris Pratt, Anderson Cooper. But there is a world of talent outside the big and small screens, and UTA, along with its competitors Creative Artists Agency and Endeavor, has been working to expand into it—or, rather, to fold those worlds into one another. 

In 2016 UTA opened its fine arts division, UTA Artist Space, in Los Angeles, as a foothold in the art world via LA’s firmly established gallery scene. An exhibition space quickly followed, and soon began hosting exhibitions by artists like Ai Weiwei and Ferrari Sheppard. (UTA isn’t alone in this art world toe-dipping: Endeavor is a majority shareholder the Frieze global art fair machine.) Last year UTA opened its second Artist Space gallery in Atlanta, another film and television industry hub whose art scene has recently grown.

With Rodriguez, and others like him, UTA is not only expanding into the world of fine arts but also acknowledging that social media, despite what top tier galleries and Ivy League educated artists think about it, can foster and even be a springboard for “legitimate” artistic talent, however one chooses to measure it.

With more than 30 million followers on TikTok alone, Rodriguez has developed a following that has even extended to the outside world. Considering merely follower count, he would be the most recognizable artist in the world. He regularly gets noticed on the street. Cab drivers tell him they love his drawings. Despite all this, he doesn’t hold much sway among galleries in Tribeca or Chelsea.

Rodriguez began making art he was 8 years old, starting with graffiti. Since graduating from New York’s High School of Art and Design, he’s continued treating his portraiture like a day job, working eight hours a day, five days a week. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Rodriguez admitted he rarely does anything else, to the point that he “only has, like, five friends.”

For the subway drawings, Rodriguez said he approaches his subject before he starts working, “but I don’t show them the drawing until I’m filming. The reaction is genuine.” The oil paintings in his upcoming show were done by taking candid photographs which he then used as references back in the studio.

His dedication paid off. In 2019 he was a finalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, conducted by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. His entry was a hyper-realistic portrait of his friend and mentor, sculptor John Ahearn, looking off into the distance, his hands folded and brow furrowed. The two met a few years ago when Rodriguez had a show at BronxArtSpace, and have been close ever since.

Then, in 2020, he decided that TikTok might be the best path to success for an artist without an Ivy League background or art world connections. When he wasn’t painting, he was listening to podcasts about social media, immersing himself in YouTube videos by self-proclaimed TikTok gurus, confident that his work was good enough to one day get millions of views that would lead to portrait commissions with high price tags.

He didn’t find success immediately. Rodriguez’s first videos only got between 300 and 400 views—which, he thought to himself, wasn’t nearly enough.

Throughout his research, a common thread was appealing to a mass audience. So he began painting portraits of his favorite rappers, Ye and Tyler the Creator, to up the general audience appeal. Those did better, but the numbers were still far from what he hoped to achieve.

Things started to click when he noticed that many of his virtual tutors suggested that a narrative was the best way to draw people in. “You have to have a good hook, a good middle story, and a good ending,” Rodriguez said. “And a really good incentive to watch to the end.”

He started planning out his videos, frame by frame, second by second. Rodriguez spoke about his process as though he were a tech guru readying a new product. “The algorithm boosts the videos that get watched the most, and the people scrolling are given the best of the best,” he said. “All I had to focus on is keeping people on the app, and somehow molding my work into something that’s entertainment.”

For two years, he put down his brushes and focused solely on his subway sketches and TikTok videos, and made money through the platform’s brand deals. As of today, he has 31.9 million followers. He’s sketched Joe Biden, Robert De Niro, and Steve Cohen.

All that fame, of course, doesn’t guarantee that Rodriguez will be accepted by the traditional art world, or ever get a deal with a major gallery. But perhaps that doesn’t matter as much today as it did in the past.

“As art has no intrinsic value, the discovery and positioning of artists depends on consensus, which is traditionally driven by those who can endow an artist and their practice with symbolic value—museums, curators, critics, etc.,” said Alex Glauber, president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors. “However if an artist’s audience values different markers of success—say, TikTok followers rather than inclusion in the Venice Biennale—then you’re dealing with a different artistic ecosystem, one better suited for a talent agency than a traditional gallery.”

UTA isn’t just representing Rodriguez in the art world. When he signed with UTA it was for what the industry calls “all areas.” He’s the embodiment of UTA’s belief in the power of crossover artists.

“All the normal things we might say would qualify someone to be seen as a great, respected artist in the way that we traditionally see them: Devon throws that narrative completely out the window every single time,” said Arthur Lewis, creative director of UTA Fine Arts. “When you meet someone who has Devon’s raw capabilities, and is still so humble and honest about what he does, and at the same time, is so incredibly talented, it’s hard to ignore.”

Lewis, an ARTnews Top 200 collector, has been actively working to introduce Rodriguez to the intricacies of the art world and vice versa. They went to Art Basel together, and they’ve attended openings in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Lewis has also introduced Rodriguez to major collectors. Rodriguez seems to be catching on quickly. When asked, neither he nor Lewis would say exactly to whom he’d been introduced, or if those collectors bought any of his works.

“I want them to get to know him and get him indoctrinated into this world, because it is still a very different landscape,” Lewis said. “It’s about showing him how it works so he understands all of the parts, but still allowing him to do what he does best—to go on TikTok, create excitement.”

“Underground,” which opens September 6 at a UTA Artist’s Space pop-up in Chelsea, is an extension of the work that brought him social media fame, with subjects plucked not only from the New York subway system but also the London Underground and metros in Barcelona and Paris. The creative agency PlayLab designed the sections of the pop-up to take on an MTA aesthetic, with abstracted subway cars and LED trains chugging by.

The show could serve as a barometer for how successful UTA will be in its plan to bring together all the worlds of entertainment under one grand umbrella. Lewis said, “From its inception, I think the idea behind the Artist Space was always to make sure that there was some form of crossover. It’s recognizing that the fine arts is just another one of those beautiful extensions that people could move across as they explored other things.”

Wallace Whitney photographed in his Bronx studio on December 1.

©KATHERINE MCMAHON

Habitat is a weekly series that visits with artists in their workspaces.

This week’s studio: Wallace Whitney; Bronx, New York. “Whether it’s good or not, you have to be completely open to what you’re doing in the moment,” Wallace Whitney said while peering at an unfinished painting from his rocking chair. Whitney, 46, is an abstract painter originally from Massachusetts and has been living and working in the Bronx for the past five years. His studio is in a former synagogue near Bronx Park that was a Dominican dancehall at one point. When Whitney moved in, he also found a karaoke machine and lots of beer caps. He said, “People still knock on my door and say, ‘Hey, we’re having a birthday party, can we rent the space out?'”

Whitney typically works on about four to six paintings at a time. “If I have a show coming up,” he said, “I’ll try to start six or seven paintings, assuming I’ll get two to three done, and the ones I don’t finish will be part of the next batch.” He compared his working process to that of a train or a caterpillar. “I always try to keep something half finished and something moving towards some sort of state of done,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s a pretty scary feeling when you start from scratch. It’s a little like going to the gym after not going for six years or something. You lose it way faster then you get it in terms of being able to do this.”

Among other things, Whitney referred to painting as an editing process. “You can’t just fix a little corner, you have to fix the whole painting,” he said. “Are you willing to risk some part that you really love for the greater good of the painting?” A major part of the process is actually not painting. “There are lots of periods of letting things dry and just looking,” he said. “I’m an energetic painter, which can overwhelm things, so a lot of the process is just resisting. I’m trying to get myself to understand that and show restraint, which is a different kind of challenge.”

Whitney does not have an assistant and prefers to build and prime his own canvases. He said that he usually goes straight to the canvas with his ideas, and that sketching things out first never seems to help. Sitting behind us was an unfinished work that he began in June and considered sending to NADA Miami Beach. “I’m not convinced it will ever be finished,” he said. “It never got to the point where I felt like it was ready to leave the studio.” Many of his paintings suffer a similar fate. “I throw away a lot of canvases,” he said. “Sometimes it gets to the point where certain paintings are dead in the water and it’s an act of mercy to rip them off the stretcher and throw them away.” He tosses the canvas, keeps the stretcher, and starts anew.

Whitney’s work is currently on view at the booth of Canada gallery (which he co-founded) at NADA Miami Beach, and in March 2016 he will have a solo show at Galerie Bernard Ceysson in Luxembourg. Below, Whitney gives a tour of his studio.

ALL PHOTOS: KATHERINE MCMAHON

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"There was this space for the Torah—and also the DJ booth when it was a dancehall." His stereo system now resides there.

"I have a chair to face each direction in the studio where I can sit and reflect... I like to read nonfiction books, and then look at a painting which is sort of the opposite. When your eyesight goes from a page to the painting, it abstracts it."

A list of potential names for paintings. "They sort of pop into my head. Twice a year I’ll paint the walls all white again to start over," he said.

Whitney doesn't necessarily start a painting with a clear idea of the colors he wants to use. "I think about a color scheme and then it veers off track," he said. "I think people have their own internal sense of palette. I consciously try to make the paintings buoyant. I don’t know why, maybe it's aspirational or an attempt to be generous or fruitful."

"Sometimes I use raw pigment and linseed oil to make my own paint with a muller. I experiment and mess around a lot with materials," Whitney said. He also occasionally uses an auto-body paint gun to apply acrylic paint to canvases.

"I cleaned the studio recently, but before that the place was completely trashed. Part of my process is just going bananas and making a huge mess and not really worrying about cleaning up."

Whitney also lives in the Bronx and bikes to his studio. "I originally thought I was going to share the studio, because I’ve never had a space this big before," he said. "I started looking around for artists who wanted to split it with me, but turns out there aren’t that many artists in the neighborhood."

"This is some of my daughters' work. She loves to come in and work. It's a little nerve-wracking—she grabs the biggest brush and charges around."

The outdoor space attached to Whitney's studio, where he spends a lot of time painting. "In the process of working on a new painting outside recently, a sudden rain shower erupted and I enjoyed just watching the water beat up and change it," he said.

"This is a painting called Apparatus from 2013," Whitney said. "I was thinking about structures outside. It’s about climbing through something. I like to name my paintings things that are a little open ended, I like to use the title to point the viewer in a direction." That's a choice, he added, that allows viewers to attach their own meanings to it.

Lucien Smith, right, with Keith Rubenstein.

COURTESY BFA

On Thursday evening, there was an unusual amount of activity at an abandoned piano factory in the South Bronx, on the not-so-pristine banks of the Harlem River. A battalion of security guards clustered around the loading dock, and through the old factory’s entrance a few hundred cater-waiters in tuxes set up a dozen bars in nearly as many cavernous rooms There were atriums flooded with a thousand candles and corridors draped in foliage. There were pianos covered in red roses and gas canisters on fire. The rusted chassis of two cars were flopped in the middle of a cement warren. And standing by a massive stage where floodlight poured from 19th-century wooden rafters, was Lucien Smith, the artist who had masterminded it all, in a orange cardigan, staring at a seizure-inducing light installation.

“I don’t want to do shows anymore—the opening, the dinner, all of that,” Smith said, turning around to take in the massive wing of the space, where even an taxicab-sized disco ball seemed dwarfed. “You can never do an art show like this all the time, but everybody is going to remember this.”

In an hour’s time this would become “Macabre Suite,” a one-night show-slash-performance-slash party—or, in Smith’s words, an “art happening”—stuffed with new paintings and installations and performances. This constitutes a striking break for Smith. At 26, he is perhaps still best known for a series of abstract works on canvas created by spraying paint from a fire extinguisher, the “Rain Paintings.” They were made when he was 21 years old, and almost immediately started selling at auction for nearly $500,000, ushering in a small bubble for work that has been maligned as “Zombie Formalism.” But since a show at Skarstedt, his New York gallery, in May 2014, one of the art world’s best-known young artists has been essentially silent.

A scrap metal work by Lucien Smith.

COURTESY BFA

That silence came to an end rather defiantly by the time rapper Travis Scott came on stage around 2:00 a.m., capping a night in which the art world’s traveling band of partygoers and hangers-on was lured all the way to the Bronx, a trip that attendees fretted over as if it involved a transatlantic flight.

The seemingly odd choice of location came courtesy of realtor Keith Rubenstein, who owns a number of buildings in the area and is trying to prop up the South Bronx as the next neighborhood for the fashionable to flock to. (No small task, though a few attendees did compare the unpolished feel of the thing, with handfuls of nostalgia, to Williamsburg loft parties in the ’80s.) When he was trying to figure out how to get some quick cache for his holdings, he turned to Salon 94 founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the dealer who first discovered Smith at his Cooper Union thesis show.

“I was working with Jeanne, and she knew we were always looking at spaces to do something,” said Smith, now sitting in a tiny room with a sign for a bygone shoring engineering plant still on the wall. “Keith and Jeanne are close, and he approached her about doing a show here. I said, let me come and see it, and it made sense.”

And so the rather expensive advertisement for a building was arranged. With this unlimited space, Smith decided to combine all the aspects of his practice and let them loose for a night. There were video installations—found footage from mental institutions—playing on old TVs sitting in ponds of gravel. There were small paintings dotting the room. The hulking old cars were a work from a show he had at Bill Brady in Kansas City. The performances included a dance he choreographed with the Paris–based Butoh master Kobe Kanty. And so on.

Installation view of ‘Macabre Suite.’

COURTESY BFA

“With this, I get to pull all these references and really create something, and that’s really hard to do with just a painting show,” Smith said. “And I had to learn that lesson—it’s hard to get guided rhetoric from an exhibition.”

Though perhaps many of the visitors didn’t really notice the art at all: it was, above all else, a party, and one that featured a few dozen personalities listed as co-hosts: billionaire Ron Burkle, former Sotheby’s chief auctioneer Tobias Meyer, and Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak among them.

And despite any outer-borough phobias, thousands of people came in, the same crew that one would see on a night at openings in Manhattan airlifted to the Harlem Riviera, with a VIP section swollen with models in leather jackets and club promotors and movie stars and Knicks point guards and—very incongruously—a suited up Per Skarstedt, who shouted at a reporter, “I love it all, and I’ve never been to the Bronx before!”